2007-02-25 | SCIENCE
The Birth of the Sun

Members of a research team led by the University of Colorado at Boulder have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to peer at the embryo of an infant star in the nearby Eagle Nebula, which they believe may someday develop into a virtual twin of Earth's Sun. The object, known as an evaporating gas globule, or EGG, has the same mass as the Sun and appears to be evolving in a violent environment much like the one believed to have produced Earth's Sun, said researcher Jeffrey Linsky of JILA, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Located in a region called the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula roughly 7,000 light-years from Earth, the object -- dubbed E42 -- is thought to be in the earliest stage astronomers have ever detected a star like the Sun, said Linsky.

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