Age-Defying Star
Maybe she's born with it, maybe it's a galactic mystery
An age-defying star designated as IRAS 19312+1950 exhibits features characteristic of a very young star and a very old star.
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.
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