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The massive young star R Mon is surrounded by its reflection nebula, NGC 2261, Hubble's Variable Nebula. In the top image, the color scale has been wrapped around twice to increase the display contrast. The middle one is a composite image and the bottom one is a polarisation image of R Mon.
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MWC 1080 is a young star with about 8 times the mass of our Sun and about 10,000 times the luminosity of the Sun. It has an age of less than 1 Million years and is located in constellation Cassiopeia at a distance of 6,000 lightyears. MWC 1080 is embedded in a dark cloud and illuminates a bright nebulosity. Previous studies reported a handful of young low-mass stars associated with MWC 1080. For the first time MWC 1080 has now been observed with high-spatial resolution from the ground using a technique called adaptive optics.
The new adaptive optics observations reveal that up to 100 faint, young low-mass objects cluster around MWC 1080, i.e. ten times as many stars as had previously been assumed. ``It's amazing to discover that many faint cluster members, many of which appear still to have circumstellar disks, and some of which could possibly be young brown dwarfs,'' says Dr. Laird Close, a staff scientist at the European Southern Observatory.
The young star cluster has a diameter of 3 lightyears. Its stellar density is several 100 times higher than the stellar density near the Sun (3 lightyears corresponds to slightly less than the distance from the Sun to its nearest neighbor). Still, astronomers expect the cluster to gradually dissolve over the next 10 to 20 Million years. The cluster members - including the presumed brown dwarfs - will then become ``free-floating'' field objects, very much alike the recently discovered population of free-floating brown dwarfs in the solar neighborhood. ``Follow-up spectroscopic observations of the faint sources, however, are still necessary in order to test if they are indeed substellar,'' cautions Dan Potter, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii.
More information about this observation on Wolfgang Brandner's homepage : http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~brandner/aas195.html