A few links related to young stars, rotation, ...

Star formation

Galleries (pretty pictures) of nebulae; note that not all of the nebulae listed on these pages are necessarily star-forming regions.

Space Telescope images of nebulae and page of images on of stellar evolution
press release with images from trifid nebula (one that looks like 'antennae')
ISO science gallery -- mid and far-ir wavelengths -- see especially the "interstellar medium" page for some cool images.
2MASS near-IR all-sky survey; see especially the orion images on this page and the "2-MASSier" (Messier) gallery (M17=Eagle, M20=Trifid)
The Web Nebulae
NOAO nebula gallery
web page on my larger rotation collaboration (which has links to images specifically related to my fields in Orion and NGC 2264)

Star formation in general

Star formation overview from IPAC
page from UIUC on star formation, including a movie(!) of a simulation of how stars might form. I haven't been able to download the movie myself yet.. (slow network!)
Feature story I helped write on star formation from the JPL website

Herbig-Haro objects, or HH objects, are (generally speaking) knots of stuff ejected from very young stars. The thing that I think makes them particularly cool is that sometimes these knots are found a long way away from the star that ejected them. There is a movie I've seen that shows some of these things actually moving, but unfortunately, I can't find it on the web. Here are some of the other links I could find.

images of some HH objects by Hubble The bowshocks and knots in the jets are the named HH objects.
APOD images of HH objects include:
- HH objects in Orion A (image from NOAO)
- HH 34 (image from VLT)
- HH 1 and HH 2 (image from HST)
- HH 111 (another image from HST)
Image and discussion of knots in one of the jets
HH objects from NOAO
HH objects from the AAT
Press release from a friend's research-- x-rays were observed from an HH object in Orion.
The real researcher's catalog of them is on line here; I include this because it lists RA and Dec in case you want to try to look at these beasties yourself. They're not very big or bright, so I am not sure if it would work from a small telescope.

Variable Stars

Young stars are variable, as you might guess from the name of one of the prototype young stars, T Tauri.

American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO), Note that their page on types of variables stars doesn't list young stars as a separate class. Young stars fall under several categories on their list including (of course) rotating stars. You might call some of them cataclysmic variables (though they're not R Cor Bor stars or novae or any of the others on the AAVSO listing, accretion events are surely cataclysmic).
note also the AAVSO Hands-On Astrophysics program -- very cool!!

Sunspots

The stars I study in detail are those with big star spots, like sunspots, but bigger (because the star is younger and generally rotating faster than the sun) and more stable (no one knows why).

Stanford Solar Center cool images and labs, including lab on the spinning sun
SOHO web pages
the Sun right now in several wavelengths from SOHO (very cool). For optical images, see current images from Sunspot, NM
Exploratorium lab on sunspots
page on Galileo's Sunspot Observations

My research in particular

web page on the larger rotation collaboration (collaborators, research papers, links to related images)
sky map with Orion and Monoceros with NGC 2264 marked. My 45-arcminute fields are about the size of the white dot marking NGC 2264; we have one field in NGC 2264, and 4 in Orion, surrounding but not including the Trapezium region. For scale, the whole HST mosaic (multiple pointings) of the Trapezium region is a little less than a pixel in this graphic.

Astronomy at IR wavelengths and Spitzer

I use near-IR to help determine if a star has a circumstellar disk or not. Thank you to the Spitzer Science Center for providing me with the handouts I distributed at the talk!

Spitzer has an extensive Education and Public Outreach page. See in particular the infrared zoo.
IPAC has a great page on IR astronomy.
2MASS near-IR all-sky survey; see especially the orion images on this page. Note that you can also access the real 2MASS data, e.g. fits images.
ISO science gallery (mid and far-ir wavelengths)
People have asked me about observing IR from the ground. Here is a stylized graphic and description of which parts of the IR spectrum make it through to the ground.

Astronomy as a career

I have a separate page for those links.

Go back to my home page

Last substantially modified 15 Sep 02 by rebull
Any opinions expressed here are well-reasoned and insightful, but in no way reflect those of NASA/JPL or Caltech. No electrons were harmed in the creation of these pages.

The research described here was partially carried out at IPAC, which is part of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, operated by the California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.