Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2023

43 JULY-AUGUST 2023 ASTRO PUBLISHING gast, an astronomer at the Univer- sity of Vienna in Austria and lead author of the new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics . “This will allow us to understand the processes that transform gas and dust into stars.” Stars form when clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own grav- ity, but the details of how this hap- pens are not fully understood. How many stars are born out of a cloud? How massive are they? How many stars will also have planets? To answer these questions, Mein- gast’s team surveyed five nearby star-forming regions with the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observa- T his image shows the region Lupus 2. New stars are born in the colourful clouds of gas and dust seen here. The infrared observations underlying this image reveal new details in the star-forming regions that are usually obscured by the clouds of dust. The image was produced with data collected by the VIRCAM instrument, which is attached to the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observa- tory in Chile. The observations were done as part of the VISIONS survey, which will allow astronomers to better understand how stars form in these dust-en- shrouded regions. [ESO/Meingast et al.] U sing ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astron- omy (VISTA), astronomers have created a vast infrared atlas of five nearby stellar nurseries by piec- ing together more than one million images. These large mosaics reveal young stars in the making, embed- ded in thick clouds of dust. Thanks to these observations, astronomers have a unique tool with which to decipher the complex puzzle of stel- lar birth. “In these images we can detect even the faintest sources of light, like stars far less massive than the Sun, revealing objects that no one has ever seen before,” says Stefan Mein-