IRAS 20324: Evaporating
Protostar
From NASA’s Astronomy
Picture of the Day
Will this
caterpillar-shaped interstellar cloud one day evolve into a butterfly-shaped
nebula? No one is sure.
What is sure is that IRAS 20324+4057, on
the inside, is contracting to form a new star. On the outside, however, energetic winds are
blowing and energetic light is eroding away much of the gas and dust that might have
been used to form the star.
Therefore, no one is
sure what mass the resulting star
will have, and, therefore, no one knows the fate of this star.
Were the winds and light
to whittle the protostar down
near the mass of the Sun, the outer atmosphere of this new star may one day
expand into a planetary
nebula, possibly even one that looks like a butterfly.
Alternatively, if the stellar cocoon retains
enough mass, a massive star will form that will one day explode in a supernova.
The eroding protostellar nebula
IRAS 20324+4057 spans about one light year and lies about 4,500 light years
away toward the
constellation of the Swan (Cygnus).
The image of
IRAS 20324+4057 was taken with the Hubble Space
Telescope in 2006 but released last week.
The battle between
gravity and light will likely take
over 100,000 years to play out, but clever observations and
deductions may yet yield telling clues well
before that.
