(Photo Credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS/SPIRE/HOBYS)
The European Space Agency’s Herschel space observatory captured this amazing image showing a sequence of star-forming regions in the molecular cloud W48, which is 10,000 light-years away from Earth in the Aquila constellation.
The blue cloud in the lower left corner is the oldest stellar nursery in the image. Hidden inside are young and massive stars which have shaped it into a bubble. The heating of it’s diffuse gas makes the cloud shine at the longest wavelengths detected by Herschel.
To its right is another glowing cloud which conceals clumps of cosmic matter that will eventually evolve into massive stars.
These clumps (some of which are visible as bright blotches of light) are also lined up by their age. The older ones are visible in the lower-left while the younger ones are located in the upper-right section of the cloud. The youngest clump in this sequence is the small cyan lump at the centre of the image. It harbours the seeds of future massive stars.
Astronomers believe that this stellar birth sequence is the result of dozens of supernovas that exploded over 10 million years ago in a region called Aquila Supershell.
By compressing its surrounding material, these supernovas may have initiated a wave of star formation that sparked each one of these cosmic cloud cribs.
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