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| Joint Astronomy Centre |
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A cradle of baby stars...
True-colour JHK imaging of W51 The image above shows a nest of young, newly-born stars. The region contains both low and high mass protostars. The stars themselves form in a cluster, with the more numerous low-mass stars distributed around their larger, more massive siblings. The cluster itself is still surrounded by the parent cloud from which the stars were born. The data were obtained at UKIRT with UFTI in August 2001, on a night when the seeing was exceptionally good (~0.35 arcseconds at 2 microns); the angular size of the above field is only about 100 arcsec across. Below are similar JHK-colour images of another high-mass star-forming region; these data were also snapped by UFTI observers. This bright, protostellar cluster is in the same, distant part of the Milky Way. In fact, this region is thought to be one of the most distant star forming regions known in our Galaxy. The two diffuse, red patches are loosely referred to as W51-IRS1 and W51-IRS2 (click on the thumbnail below to see IRS1 and IRS2 in the full image - the thumbnail only shows IRS2!). The bright star on the left in the full image is a very young, new-born star which is illuminating the remains of the cloud from which it was born. W51-IRS1 is a nice example of an "HII" region, i.e. a zone of ionised gas adjacent to a young, hot star.
Another colour image of this IRS1/IRS2 region, this time composed from three narrow-band images, is shown here. All data described on this page were obtained for M.S. Nanda Kumar and Chris Davis by the UKIRT service observing team in 2000 and 2001 with UFTI.
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