{"id":121544,"date":"2021-04-14T13:23:11","date_gmt":"2021-04-14T20:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/yellowballs-offer-new-insights-into-star-formation"},"modified":"2021-04-14T13:23:11","modified_gmt":"2021-04-14T20:23:11","slug":"yellowballs-offer-new-insights-into-star-formation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/yellowballs-offer-new-insights-into-star-formation","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Yellowballs\u2019 offer new insights into star formation"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A serendipitous discovery by citizen scientists has provided a unique new window into the diverse environments that produce stars and star clusters, revealing the presence of \u201cstellar nurseries\u201d before infant stars emerge from their birth clouds, according to Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Grace Wolf-Chase.<\/p>\n

\u201cYellowballs are small compact features that were identified in infrared images acquired by the Spitzer Space Telescope during online discussions on the Milky Way Project, an initiative on the online citizen science platform zooniverse.org, that asked citizen scientists to help identify features associated with young, massive stars<\/a> greater than 10 solar masses,\u201d said Wolf-Chase, lead author of \u201cThe Milky Way Project: Probing Star Formation with First Results on Yellowballs from DR2,\u201d which appears in the Astrophysical Journal<\/i>. \u201cEarly research suggested yellowballs are produced by young stars as they heat the surrounding gas and dust from which they were born.\u201d<\/p>\n

The yellowballs discovered by citizen scientists shed infrared light<\/a> on a very early stage in the development of star clusters, when they are a \u2018mere\u2019 hundred thousand years old. \u201cThis is the point at which their presence is first revealed, but they remain embedded in their dusty birth cocoons,\u201d Wolf-Chase said. \u201cThis allows us to link the properties of stars with their birth environments, as if a human were giving birth to a hundred or so infants at once.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A serendipitous discovery by citizen scientists has provided a unique new window into the diverse environments that produce stars and star clusters, revealing the presence of \u201cstellar nurseries\u201d before infant stars emerge from their birth clouds, according to Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Grace Wolf-Chase. \u201cYellowballs are small compact features that were identified in infrared [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121544\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}