Young Hot Stars and Space Elephants Caught on Researchers' Camera

The most detailed image yet of the puzzling clouds surrounding a distant star cluster reveals a surreal, almost Dr. Seuss-like world complete with so-called elephant trunks.

Taken by astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the picture "shows how these clouds of gas and dust have been sculpted into whimsical bubbles, arcs and the odd features known as elephant trunks by the stellar winds flowing from this gathering of hot young stars," officials wrote in a description.

Stars are usually born in litters like the one seen here, known as NGC 3572. Located in the southern constellation of Carina, the star cluster is home to an array of hot, young blue-white stars whose stellar winds are so powerful they often scatter their surrounding gas and dust.

While these stars may have many siblings, none of them are twins, each differing in size, mass, temperature and color. And because the mass of a star determines its lifespan and manner of death, any given cluster contains stars experiencing different stages in their development.

As the stars in a cluster grow, they begin to venture out on their own. Within tens or hundreds of millions of years, their gravitational interactions and the violent supernova explosions of the more massive, short-lived stars push them and the remaining gas apart.

In this case, the molecular cloud where the young stars were born is still visible, the radiation from its offspring causing it to glow and warp into bubbles, arcs and dark columns the researchers refer to as elephant trunks.

Slightly above the center of the image is curious object: a tiny ring-like nebula the origins of which are not clear. "It is probably a dense leftover from the molecular cloud that formed the cluster," the officials offered, "perhaps a bubble created around a very bright hot star." Another possibility is that of a misshapen planetary nebula -- a term that refers to the corpse of a star no longer able to sustain itself through fusion reactions in its core.