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Paris – AFP
An international team of astronomers has provided an unprecedented painting of stellar nurseries, from gas clouds to stars, as part of the Fangs-Muse program, based on 19 nearby galaxies.
This result is the result of a campaign that began in 2017 to monitor the most distant galaxies from Earth at a distance of around 60 million light years, while the nearest are only five million. light years away.
Eric Emselm, astronomer at the Southern European Telescope, co-director of the campaign, said that this work “provided for the first time a view of the galaxies in which stars form in the near universe, with a level of detail that lets look at objects, where stars form like clouds of gas. “
The MUSE instrument, a spectrometer from the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, was instrumental in the monitoring effort. Its data includes more than 30,000 images of hot gas nebulae and 15 million spectra, and will soon be available to the scientific community.
The objective is to try to understand “what triggers or inhibits the formation of stars at a given location in the galaxy”, according to Emselm of the Center for Research in Astrophysics in Lyon.
MUSE is an international cooperation program and FANGS brings together scientists from several continents under its banner to study the phases of the baryonic cycle that generates stellar matter. The program is based on two first-rate instruments, the “Alma” radio telescope of the European Southern Observatory and the “Hubble” telescope, which makes it possible to “recover the stages” of star formation, according to Emsilim.
And it is possible, thanks to “Muse”, to see the next steps when gas clouds form large masses of stars, some of which may develop over millions of years, while others may explode. by gas ejection. These gas bubbles can be seen opening up and distributing their contents into the surrounding ocean.
MUSE monitors hot gases and young and old stars, while Hubble, which has the world’s highest resolution images, can determine star masses, and see gas and dust bubbles with precision less than 30 light years.
The data presented, derived from the temperatures, density and chemical composition of stars and gases, will fuel a flood of scientific articles in the years to come.
Astronomer Eva Schinnerer from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy points out that new tools must be used to further research in this regard, such as the James Webb telescope and the giant European telescope. The accuracy of the map “which is drawn (with Vangs) is barely sufficient to distinguish the clouds from which the stars are formed, and it is not enough to know in detail what is going on inside”.
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