19 September 2007
NASA/CXC/JPL-Caltech/CfA
Two of NASA's Great Observatories, the Spitzer Space Telescope (SST) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO), teamed up to observe a dazzling cosmic view, a star-birth region containing a young star cluster in its heart. This region, known as the Coronet, lies in the constellation Corona Australis, the Southern Crown.
At only about 420 light-years away, the Coronet is one of the nearest star-forming regions to Earth. The Coronet contains a loose cluster of a few dozen young stars with a wide range of masses and at various stages of evolution, giving astronomers an opportunity to observe embryonic stars simultaneously in several wavelengths.
The above image is a composite of an X-ray image from CXO (purple) and an infrared image from SST (orange, green, and cyan). The Spitzer image shows young stars and diffuse emission from cosmic dust. As the Coronet contains a host of young stars in different evolutionary stages, astronomers can use these data to pinpoint details of how the youngest stars evolve.
Further Reading
SST
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer/index.shtml
Aymen Mohamed Ibrahem
Senior Astronomy Specialist