Credit X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Valparaiso/M. Kuhn et al; IR: NASA/JPL/WISE
In some ways, star clusters
are like giant families with thousands of stellar siblings. These stars
come from the same origins — a common cloud of gas and dust — and are
bound to one another by gravity. Astronomers think that our Sun was born
in a star cluster about 4.6 billion years ago that quickly dispersed.
By studying young star clusters, astronomers hope to learn more about
how stars — including our Sun — are born. NGC 6231, located about 5,200
light years from Earth, is an ideal testbed for studying a stellar cluster at a critical stage of its evolution: not long after star formation has stopped.
The discovery of NGC 6231 is attributed to Giovanni Battista
Hodierna, an Italian mathematician and priest who published observations
of the cluster in 1654. Sky watchers today can find the star cluster to
the southwest of the tail of the constellation Scorpius.
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory
has been used to identify the young Sun-like stars in NGC 6231, which
have, until recently, been hiding in plain sight. Young star clusters
like NGC 6231 are found in the band of the Milky Way on the sky. As a
result, interloping stars lying in front of or behind NGC 6231 greatly
outnumber the stars in the cluster. These stars will generally be much
older than those in NGC 6231, so members of the cluster can be
identified by selecting signs of stellar youth.
Young stars stand out to Chandra because they have strong magnetic
activity that heats their outer atmosphere to tens of millions of
degrees Celsius and causes them to emit X-rays. Infrared measurements assist in verifying that an X-ray source is a young star and in inferring the star's properties.
This Chandra X-ray image of NGC 6231 shows a close-up of the inner
region of the cluster. Chandra can detect a range of X-ray light, which
has been split into three bands to create this image. Red, green, and
blue represents the lower, medium, and high-energy X-rays. The brightest
X-ray emission is white.
The Chandra data, combined with infrared data from the Visible and
Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) Variables in the Vía
Lactéa survey has provided the best census of young stars in NGC 6231
available. An infrared image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey
explorer is shown on the left.
There are an estimated 5,700 to 7,500 young stars in NGC 6231 in the
Chandra field of view, about twice the number of stars in the well-known
Orion star cluster.
The stars in NGC 6231 are slightly older (3.2 million years on average)
than those in Orion (2.5 million years old). However, NGC 6231 is much
larger in volume and therefore the number density of its stars, that is,
their proximity to one another, is much lower, by a factor of about 30.
These differences enable scientists to study the diversity of
properties for star clusters during the first few million years of their
life.
Chandra studies of this and other young star clusters, have allowed
astronomers to build up a sample from which cluster evolution can be
studied. These clusters come from dozens of star-forming regions, but
NGC 6231 adds a crucial piece to this puzzle because it shows how a
cluster looks after the end of star formation. A comparison of the ages,
sizes and masses of clusters in this sample implies that NGC 6231 has
expanded from a more compact initial state, but it has not expanded
sufficiently fast for its stars to break free from the cluster’s
gravitational pull. Astronomers are not sure what will happen next: will
it remain held together by gravity? Or will its constituents one day
disperse as our Sun’s ancestral cluster once did?
Nearby star-forming regions frequently contain multiple star
clusters, most of which are individually less massive than NGC 6231. The
simple structure of NGC 6231, along with its relatively high mass,
suggests that NGC 6231 was built up by mergers of several star clusters
early its lifetime, a process known as "hierarchical cluster assembly".
Two papers describing recent studies of NGC 6231, both led by Michael
Kuhn while at the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile, have been
published and are available online at https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.00017 and https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.01731.
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages
the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in
Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, controls Chandra's science and flight operations.
Fast Facts for NGC 6231:
Scale: Infrared image is ~5 degrees across (about 452 light years); Right: Xray image is ~16 arcmin across (about 24 light years)
Category: Normal Stars & Star Clusters
Coordinates (J2000): RA 16h 54m 08.51s | Dec -41° 49' 36.0"
Constellation: Scorpius
Observation Date: July 2005
Observation Time: 33 hours 30 minutes
Obs. ID: 5372, 6291
Instrument: ACIS
References: Kuhn, M. et al. 2017, AJ, 154, 87; arXiv:1706.00017 Kuhn, M. et al. 2017, AJ, 154, 214; arXiv:1710.01731
Color Code: Left: Infrared (red, yellow, green, cyan, blue); Right: X-ray (red, green, blue).
Distance Estimate: About 1.59 kpc (5,190 light years)
Source: NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory
