ESA Portal - Inside the dark heart of the Eagle
Beautiful images returned from the European Space Agency’s new Herschel Space Observatory, orbiting the L2 Lagrange point of Sun-Earth, show star birth inside a dark cloud in the Eagle Nebula.
Embedded within the dusty filaments in the Aquila image are 700 condensations of dust and gas that will eventually become stars. Astronomers estimate that about 100 are protostars, celestial objects in the final stages of formation. Each one just needs to ignite nuclear fusion in its core to become a true star. The other 600 objects are insufficiently developed to be considered protostars, but these too will eventually become another generation of stars.
This cloud is part of Gould’s Belt, a giant ring of stars that circles the night sky – the Solar System just happens to lie near the centre of the belt. The first to notice this unexpected alignment, in the mid-19th century, was England’s John Herschel, the son of William, after whom ESA’s Herschel telescope is named. But it was Boston-born Benjamin Gould who brought the ring to wider attention in 1874.
