by Ann » Sat Oct 19, 2013 8:24 am
That's a very nice image!
I checked the area with my software, and the blue stars are indeed very young. All are main sequence stars, and none is evolved, even though massive stars like these ones evolve very quickly.
All the brighter stars in the picture are far away. Even the red star is pretty far away, but it is a foreground object nonetheless. Its parallax is just a bit larger than the parallaxes of the blue stars, and its proper motion is quite different. I also think that the red star is a little bit less affected by dust than the blue stars, although I can't be sure. The blue stars are all quite reddened by all the dust around them. Most of them have apparent B-V indexes around +0.6, similar to the B-V index of the Sun, but in reality they have color indexes around -0.2.
According to my software there are at least two O stars among these stellar youngsters. Apart from the one at top, there is also the one at bottom right, whose lower diffraction spikes have been "cut off"!
Ann
That's a very nice image! :D
I checked the area with my software, and the blue stars are indeed very young. All are main sequence stars, and none is evolved, even though massive stars like these ones evolve very quickly.
All the brighter stars in the picture are far away. Even the red star is pretty far away, but it is a foreground object nonetheless. Its parallax is just a bit larger than the parallaxes of the blue stars, and its proper motion is quite different. I also think that the red star is a little bit less affected by dust than the blue stars, although I can't be sure. The blue stars are all quite reddened by all the dust around them. Most of them have apparent B-V indexes around +0.6, similar to the B-V index of the Sun, but in reality they have color indexes around -0.2.
According to my software there are at least two O stars among these stellar youngsters. Apart from the one at top, there is also the one at bottom right, whose lower diffraction spikes have been "cut off"!
Ann