Young Stellar Object IRAS 13481-6124 in its 'cradle' | NASA Spitzer Space Telescope

Young Stellar Object IRAS 13481-6124 in its 'cradle' | NASA Spitzer Space Telescope

The object IRAS 13481-6124 (the bright "star" upper left), consisting of a young central star, about twenty times the mass of our Sun and five times its radius, surrounded by its pre-natal cocoon, is the first massive baby star that astronomers could obtain an image of a dusty disc closely encircling it, providing direct evidence that massive stars do form in the same way as their smaller brethren—and closing an enduring debate.

Distance: ~10,000 light years from Earth

From archival images obtained by the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope (seen here) as well as from observations done with the APEX 12-meter sub-millimeter telescope, astronomers discovered the presence of a jet, hinting at the presence of a disc. This was then confirmed by observations made with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Interferometer.

More About the Mission
JPL managed the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington until the mission was retired in January 2020. Science operations were conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech. Spacecraft operations were based at Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive operated by IPAC at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about Spitzer, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/spitzer

Credit: ESO/Spitzer/NASA/JPL/S. Kraus
Release Date: July 14, 2010

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