This image was put out yesterday by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. It shows new stars in the ‘Rho Oph’ star-forming region 407 light years away from Earth.

“Rho Oph is a favourite region for astronomers studying star formation. Because the stars are so young, we can observe them at a very early evolutionary stage, and because the Ophiuchus molecular cloud is relatively close, we can resolve more detail than in more distant clusters, like Orion,” said Lori Allen, lead investigator of the new observations (press release).

Colours in the image reflect the relative temperatures and evolutionary states. Youngest stars, surrounded by dusty disks of gas from which they are forming, are red. Older stars are blue. The white patch in the centre right is a region where the cloud is glowing infrared from heating of dust by the young stars on the right hand edge of the cloud.

There’s a really nice post on the Bad Astronomy blog about the photos, which goes into why “one of the most amazing things we have learned in the centuries of the scientific pursuit of astronomy is that stars are born, they live out their lives, and that they die”.

Want more? Researchers have also uncovered “what may be one of the youngest and brightest galaxies ever seen in the middle of the cosmic ‘dark ages’, just 700 million years after the beginning of our universe”. Image below the fold.

About 400,000 years after the Big Bang matter cooled and formed clouds of hydrogen. Then at some point in the ‘dark age’ stars began to form and their light reheated the cold hydrogen, says NASA (press release, image details).

“This galaxy presumably is one of the many galaxies that helped end the dark ages. Astronomers are fairly certain that high-energy objects such as quasars did not provide enough energy to end the dark ages of the universe. But many young star-forming galaxies may have produced enough energy to end it,” says Larry Bradley of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, leader of the study.

Image top: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA

Image bottom: NASA/ESA