Peculiar age-defying star 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 our 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.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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