The Camera of the Very Large Telescope caught the magnificent Orion Nebula and the cluster of young stars associated with it. Massive objects are actively forming on this territory, 1350 light years away from us.
New observations in the Very Large Telescope showed three different populations of child stars living in the Orion Nebula. This discovery reveals new information about the cluster formation process. It seems that the creation of stars can be carried out in separate flashes, where each occurs more rapidly than expected.
Images were extracted using OmegaCAM on the VLT. The object is the nearest star hospital at a distance of 1350 light years. But this is not just a beautiful picture. Scientists used information of a non-parallel property to determine with great accuracy the brightness and colors of all the stars. From here it turned out to get also mass and age. Surprisingly, the data revealed three different sequences with potentially different ages. It turned out that at the beginning of their lives the stars did not appear simultaneously. That is, researchers will have to correct their understanding of the process of star birth. In scientific circles, the possibility was considered that some stars are simply hidden by nearby ones, but then we would be faced with the extraordinary properties of couples that we had not seen before.
Formally, so far no one can refute the idea of double stars, but there is also an option with three generations that appeared consistently over 3 million years.
