Surrounded by Beauty and Wonders: T Tauri Stars and Nebulae

ESA/Hubble, R. Sahai and NASA's image from Hubble Space Telescope: reflection nebula IRAS 05437+2502, from the Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys, created from images taken through yellow (F606W) and near-infrared (F814W) filters. (2010)
Reflection nebula IRAS 05437+2502 in Taurus.

“…All of us dwell under the same sky. All of us are moved by the beauty revealed in the cosmos and reflected in the study of the heavenly bodies and substances. In this sense, we are united by the desire to discover the truth about how this marvellous universe operates; and in this, we draw ever closer to the Creator….”
(Address to Participants in the Summer Course of the Vatican Observatory, Pope Francis (June 11, 2016))

My interest in science started as a fascination with dinosaurs. By the time I left high school, that fascination included astronomy, physics, cosmology, and more.

My academic specialties were history and English, but I never lost my intense interest in pretty much everything else.

That didn’t change when I became a Catholic — partly because where my faith is involved, paying attention to the wonders and beauty surrounding us isn’t a problem.


The Enigmatic IRAS Ghost Nebula

ESA/Hubble, R. Sahai and NASA's image from Hubble Space Telescope: detail, reflection nebula IRAS 05437+2502, from the Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys, created from images taken through yellow (F606W) and near-infrared (F814W) filters. (2010)
Hubble image of the reflection nebula IRAS 05437+2502, in the constellation Taurus. (2010)

A Wikipedia page says that IRAS 05437+2502 is a reflection nebula in the constellation Taurus, and that it’s occasionally called the IRAS Ghost Nebula. I’ve confirmed some of that.

Along the way, I learned that scientists didn’t know about IRAS 05437+2502 before 1983 — probably.

In 1983 IRAS (Infrared Astronomical Satellite) made an all-sky survey at 12, 25, 60, and 100 micrometer wavelengths. That’s well into the infrared part of the spectrum.

IRAS spotted about 250,000 objects, including IRAS 05437+2502. It was a joint project of NASA, NIVR, and SERC — space agencies of the United States, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom — and I’m drifting off-topic.

We’ve learned a little about IRAS 05437+2502 since 1983. That’s what I gather, at least, from the designations it’s collected: WISEA J054651.49+250347.5, 2MASXi J0546515+250347, and more alphabet-soup labels.

But we haven’t learned much. Not yet. Most likely because observatories have only so much available time.

This Hubble image, for example, was a ‘snapshot’ with Hubble’s Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys: something slipped into the space telescope’s schedule, with no guarantees of results.

The image, released in 2010, was one of those lucky breaks. It’s from Hubble’s Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys, made from separate images using yellow (F606W) and near-infrared (F814W) filters.

A lucky observation of an enigmatic cloud
Newsletters, ESA/Hubble (June 14, 2010(?))

“…At first glance it appears to be a small, rather isolated, region of star formation and one might assume that the effects of fierce ultraviolet radiation from bright young stars probably were the cause of the eye-catching shapes of the gas. However, the bright boomerang-shaped feature may tell a more dramatic tale. The interaction of a high velocity young star and the cloud of gas and dust may have created this unusually sharp-edged bright arc. Such a reckless star would have been ejected from the distant young cluster where it was born and would travel at 200 000 km/hour or more through the nebula.…”
[emphasis mine]

I’ve found precious little specific information about IRAS 05437+2502, aside from its width in our skies, spanning “only 1/18th of a full moon”, and it being “distant”.

How distant?

I got a clue from the “AI Overview” that Google Search occasionally shows me:

“AI Overview”
Google Search (October 29, 2024)

“IRAS 05437+2502, a reflection nebula in the Taurus constellation, is about 380 light-years away. A light-year is a unit of distance that measures how far light travels in one Earth year, which is roughly 6 trillion miles or 9.7 trillion kilometers.”

“About 380 light-years” gave me another search term: which led me to an NBC News article, from around Halloween of 2010.

Where NBC’s “Cosmic Log” got that number, I don’t know.1

Impressions

ESA/Hubble, R. Sahai and NASA's image from Hubble Space Telescope: detail, reflection nebula IRAS 05437+2502, from the Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys, created from images taken through yellow (F606W) and near-infrared (F814W) filters. (2010)
IRAS 05437+2502: dark nebula and cosmic Rorschach test.

When I look at IRAS 05437+2502, I see a cloaked and hooded figure with arms outstretched, standing above other figures walking off to its left.

That’s not the only impression folks have gotten when viewing the dark nebula.

What’s the explanation for this spectral hand clutching at the stars?
Alasdair Wilkins, Gizmodo (August 20, 2010)

“This nebula looks like a hand reaching out to grab the stars above it….”

When I showed IRAS 05437+2502 to my oldest daughter, she saw something else:

“Looks like the nebula’s running into some sort of crystal formation.”
(‘Brigid’, in a Discord chat (October 29, 2024))

Now that I know about those impressions, I can see “this spectral hand” and “some sort of crystal formation”. But mostly, I still see the cloaked and hooded figures.

Whatever IRAS 05437+2502 looks like, it is a molecular cloud: a clump of stuff that’s a pretty good vacuum, but not as empty as most of the expanse between stars.

I’m guessing, based on that “380 light-years” mentioned in NBC’s “Cosmic Log”, that IRAS 05437+2502 is part of the Taurus-Auriga complex.

The Taurus-Auriga complex, in turn, is in the Gould Belt (or Gould’s Belt, depending on who’s talking), a ring of stars and star-forming regions in our part of the Milky Way galaxy.

Benjamin Gould spotted the belt in 1879. Scientists took a close look at it a little shy of two decades back.

More recently, scientists working at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study put some of what we’ve learned about this part of the Milky Way galaxy through 3D software. They learned that the Gould Belt is part of a vast collection of interconnected stellar nurseries.

Recapping, IRAS 05437+2502 may be near, or maybe is part of, the Taurus molecular cloud. The Taurus molecular cloud is part of the Taurus-Auriga complex. The Taurus-Auriga complex is part of the Gould Belt.

Scientists working at Radcliffe learned that the Gould Belt is part of something even bigger: a vast collection of interconnected stellar nurseries. The scientists’ location, along with the object’s shape, account for its name: the Radcliffe wave.2


Stars in the Making: the HP Tau Triplet

KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T.A. Rector's image; processed by T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF's NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF's NOIRLab), D. de Martin. Variable star HP Tau: a T Tauri star. Image created using data from the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. (2023)
New suns, a triple-star system: Kitt Peak image of HP Tau, HP Tau G2, and HP Tau G3.

One thing I like about astronomy, and science in general, is astronomers and scientists don’t seem bothered by scale.

Light from those three stars, for instance — HP Tau, HP Tau G2, HP Tau G3 — took five and half centuries to reach us; but by cosmic standards they’re almost next door.

And, again by cosmic standards, they’re quite young: less than 10,000,000 years old.

They also seem to be looking at us. Or, rather, that’s what my imagination told me.

More Impressions

Image from NASA/ESA/G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); processed by Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America). A triple-star system: HP Tau, HP Tau G2, and HP Tau G3. HP Tau is known as a T Tauri star. (May 2024)
“Here’s looking at you, kid.” Hubble image of HP Tau, HP Tau G2, and HP Tau G3.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo's 'Porträtt, karikatyr:' portrait of Wolfgang Lazius. (1562) Photo by Samuel Uhrdin, via Wikimedia Commons, used w/o permission.Humans are good at seeing patters. Sometimes we even see familiar patterns, like faces, that aren’t really there.

That’s almost certainly why the Hubble image of HP Tau, HP Tau G2, and HP Tau G3, reminds me of a face. And, probably, why someone else looked at the same image and saw a geode.

Hubble Views the Dawn of a Sun-like Star
Explore, NASA (May 15, 2024)

Looking like a glittering cosmic geode, a trio of dazzling stars blaze from the hollowed-out cavity of a reflection nebula in this new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The triple-star system is made up of the variable star HP Tau, HP Tau G2, and HP Tau G3. HP Tau is known as a T Tauri star, a type of young variable star that hasn’t begun nuclear fusion yet but is beginning to evolve into a hydrogen-fueled star similar to our Sun. T Tauri stars tend to be younger than 10 million years old — in comparison, our Sun is around 4.6 billion years old — and are often found still swaddled in the clouds of dust and gas from which they formed….”
[emphasis mine]

Before reining myself in, I found that scientists have been paying more than casual attention to HP Tau and its neighbors.3


T Tauri Stars: What We’ve Learned So Far (Very Briefly)

Illustration used in online resource 'Spectra of the T Tauri Stars', Frederick M. Walter, Professor of Astronomy, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University. This illustration may be from 'First GASPs of Star Formation in Taurus', Adele Plunkett, Daily Paper Summaries (July 20, 2012)
T Tauri stars in context: dark cloud to young stellar system in six steps.

I also found a few comparatively non-nerdy discussions of T Tauri stars, including a couple using that six-step “cartoon”, and put links in the footnotes.4

Here are a couple excerpts:

Caption for “a. dark cloud” – “f. young stellar system”
“Cartoon of star formation, showing the molecular cloud that begins to gravitationally collapse, forming a Class 0/I star in the upper row, and progressing through Class II (a.k.a. T Tauri star), pre-main-sequence and finally stellar system (with planets forming from the dusty surroundings) on the bottom row.”
(“First GASPs of Star Formation in Taurus” , Adele Plunkett, Daily Paper Summaries, astrobites (July 20, 2012))

“…A T Tauri star is a very young, lightweight star, less than 10 million years old and under 3 solar masses, that it still undergoing gravitational contraction; it represents an intermediate stage between a protostar and a mid-mass main sequence star like the Sun. T Tauri stars are found only in nebulas or very young clusters, have low-temperature (G to M type) spectra with strong emission lines and broad absorption lines….”
(“Stellar Evolution — Cycles of Formation and Destruction“, Chandra X-Ray Observatory, Smithsonian Institution)

I ran across HL Tauri, another T Tauri star, while writing this.

Ran across discussions of it, actually, not the star itself. HL Tauri is about 450 light-years away — about seven times farther than Aldebaran, but in the same general direction. That may be close on a cosmic scale, but it’s far beyond our reach at the moment.

Assuming our models of stellar evolution are moderately accurate, HL Tauri is less than 1,000,000 years old.

Since it’s got a protoplanetary disk with gaps where planets may be forming, HL Tauri is a bit of a puzzle. The star looks younger than its protoplanetary disk would suggest, so our models of stellar evolution may need more tweaking.

IAU, Sky and Telescope magazine (Roger Sinnott, Rick Fienberg)'s star chart: constellation Taurus. Three T Tauri stars circled: HL Tauri, red; IRAS 05437+2502, green; T Tauri, blue.And there you have it. T Tauri stars are young stars with a mass less than three times that of our Sun.

They’re still collapsing, and haven’t started ‘burning’ hydrogen yet.

They’re named after T Tauri, about 471 light-years away, also in the general direction of Aldebaran. T Tauri the first star studied and defined as being this type.5

I circled the location of three stars I’ve mentioned today on that IAU/Sky & Telescope star chart: HL Tauri, red; IRAS 05437+2502, green; and T Tauri, blue.


God, the Universe, Science, and Me

NASA/John Krist/Karl Stapelfeldt/Jeff Hester/Chris Burrows's images and caption. From Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2: young binary star system XZ Tauri blowing bubbles of glowing gas in the years 1995, 1998, and 2000.
XZ Tauri blowing bubbles in the years 1995, 1998, and 2000. Hubble Space Telescope images.

When my oldest daughter and I were talking about IRAS 05437+2502, she mentioned that some folks see learning how stuff works as a threat to their sense of wonder.

She didn’t phrase it that way. More like their feeling that there’s an inverse correlation between a sense of wonder and detailed knowledge.

Then our conversation wandered off in the general direction of psychological quirks and neurological oddities. Neither of us are particularly near the 50th percentile, and that’s another topic or three.

In my case, knowing that a candle’s flame is bright because of a chemical reaction, and the sun is bright because hydrogen nuclei are fusing in its core, doesn’t keep me from using their light — and admiring them as two of the wonders that fill this universe.

That admiration, in turn, for me, inspires respect for God — whose power and beauty is reflected in everything we can perceive.

“God himself created the visible world in all its richness, diversity, and order. Scripture presents the work of the Creator symbolically as a succession of six days of divine ‘work,’ concluded by the ‘rest’ of the seventh day. On the subject of​ creation, the sacred text teaches the truths revealed by God for our salvation, permitting us to ‘recognize the inner nature, the value, and the ordering of the whole of creation to the praise of God.'”

The beauty of the universe: The order and harmony of the created world results from the diversity of beings and from the relationships which exist among them. Man discovers them progressively as the laws of nature. They call forth the admiration of scholars. The beauty of creation reflects the infinite beauty of the Creator and ought to inspire the respect and submission of man’s intellect and will.”
(Catechism of the Catholic Church, 337, 341)

NASA/ESA's image, detail: LH 95 stellar nursery in the Large Magellanic Cloud. (December 2006) Paraphrase from Catechism of the Catholic Church, 283: '...These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers...'. see https://www.vaticanobservatory.org/education/catechism-catholic-church-references-science/Paying attention to God’s universe is not a new idea.

“Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air, amply spread around everywhere, question the beauty of the sky, question the serried ranks of the stars … question all these things. They all answer you, ‘Here we are, look; we’re beautiful.’…
“…Prayer:
“O God, You are never far from those who sincerely search for You. Accompany those who err and wander far from You. Turn their hearts towards what is right and let them see the signs of Your Presence in the beauty of created things. We ask this….”
(“The beauty of the unchangeable creator is to be inferred from the beauty of the changeable creation ” , St. Augustine, Sermons, 241, Easter (c.411 A.D.))

“The heavens declare the glory of God;
the firmament proclaims the works of his hands.”
(Psalms 19:2)

“When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and stars that you set in place—
“What is man that you are mindful of him,
and a son of man that you care for him?
“Yet you have made him little less than a god,
crowned him with glory and honor.”
(Psalms 8:46)

Neither is recognizing that God is large and in charge.

“Indeed, before you the whole universe is like a grain from a balance,
or a drop of morning dew come down upon the earth.”
(Wisdom 11:22)

“Our God is in heaven
and does whatever he wills.”
(Psalms 115:3)

I don’t see that changing, no matter how much we learn about T Tauri stars, candle flames, or anything else.

Basically, regarding science and religion — paying attention to the beauty and wonders surrounding us makes sense.

I’ve talked about this before. Often:


1 More than you need, or maybe want, to know about:

2 Learning about our cosmic neighborhood:

3 Analysis, patterns, perception; and a famous quote:

4 T Tauri stars, mostly:

5 Stars, a nebula, and a little cosmology:

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About Brian H. Gill

I was born in 1951. I'm a husband, father and grandfather. One of the kids graduated from college in December, 2008, and is helping her husband run businesses and raise my granddaughter; another is a cartoonist and artist; #3 daughter is a writer; my son is developing a digital game with #3 and #1 daughters. I'm also a writer and artist.
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4 Responses to Surrounded by Beauty and Wonders: T Tauri Stars and Nebulae

  1. Further I realize that I’m more of a soft than hard science guy as I read posts like these, but anyway, I like how well-rounded you are, Mr. Gill, appreciating not only English and history but also math and science!

    • 😀 I’ll start with a disclaimer.

      My old high school aptitude tests said I should be good at math. In practice, I learned – and occasionally use – algebra.

      Geometry – – – what got me through was an ability to ‘see’ shapes and spatial relationships with my mind’s eye. The equations might as well have been Sanskrit poetry.

      Calculus: oi, calculus. My wife is a computer science major and can do calculus. I tried learning, but each time one of the ideas started settling into my mind: I flickered, and it was gone. Frustrating.

      Basically, I know ***about*** math, but I don’t know math. 😉

      Science is another matter. The math is utterly beyond me. But even the nerdiest papers have a whole lot of words in them, and the logic is pretty straightforward. Plus, I’m good at researching: ferreting out facts. The trick is remembering to come up for air now and then.

      That was a wordy disclaimer.

      Thank you for your good words!

      Being well-rounded happened in large part, I think, because I’m like my father, and his father before him. We’re ***INTERESTED*** in things. And there is so much in this universe that is not merely interesting – but fascinating!

      The trick is remembering that, and paying attention. Which, again, for folks like us, is our default setting.

      • I am reminded of how my singing talent does not come with an audio engineering talent and how I work with musical audio engineers. I may not understand audio engineering as deeply as my collaborators do, but I just need to have a basic grasp on what we’re doing, send the clearest directions I can give, and learn what I can get from our efforts to bridge the gap. Feeling one’s way around isn’t necessarily bad, no? But it’s even better if we give our all into knowing our way around, too, whatever our bests are meant to be.

Thanks for taking time to comment!