The object stands out as extremely bright inside a large, chemically rich cloud of material, as shown in this image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
A NASA-led team of scientists thinks the star – which is about 10 times as massive as our sun and emits about 20,000 times as much energy – is a newly forming protostar.
That was a big surprise because the region had not been known as a stellar nursery before.
But the presence of a nearby interstellar bubble, which indicates the presence of a recently formed massive star, also supports this idea.
