Astronomers have used the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) to create an infrared atlas of five nearby stellar nurseries by piecing together over one million images. These mosaics reveal young stars in the making, embedded in thick clouds of dust. Stefan Meingast, an astronomer at the University of Vienna in Austria and lead author of the new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, said: “In these images we can detect even the faintest sources of light, like stars far less massive than the Sun, revealing objects that no one has ever seen before.” The VISIONS atlas will keep astronomers busy for years to come and will set the groundwork for future observations with other telescopes such as ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in Chile.
