The Sun would have been born in a region very similar to this one.
The Lupus 3 star formation region is within the Scorpio constellation, only 600 light-years from Earth. It is part of a larger complex called Lupus Clouds, named after the adjacent constellation, Lupus (Wolf Constellation). The clouds resemble smoke flowing over a background of millions of stars, but in fact these clouds are a dark nebula.
Nebulae are large strips of gas and dust hanging between the stars, sometimes stretching over hundreds of light years. While many nebulae are illuminated spectacularly by the intense radiation of hot stars, dark nebulae wrap the light of celestial objects within them.
Lupus 3 has an irregular shape, like a misshapen snake in the sky. It is a region of contrasts, with dark areas against the glow of bright blue stars in the center. Like most dark nebulae, Lupus 3 is an active star-forming region, consisting mainly of young stars and protostars. Nearby disturbances can cause denser clusters of the nebula to contract by gravity, increasing their temperature and process pressure. Eventually, a protostar is born from the extreme conditions at the core of this collapsed cloud.
The two bright stars in the center of the image, according to a statement from the European Southern Observatory, experienced precisely this process.
These two stars are still very young, so young that nuclear fusion has not yet been activated in their nuclei. Its brightness, on the other hand, is caused by the conversion of gravitational energy into heat when its turbulent nuclei contract.
Understanding nebulae is fundamental to understanding the processes of star formation; in fact, it is believed that the Sun was formed in a region very similar to Lupus 3 more than four billion years ago.
