Coreshine
Coreshine is an astronomical term for infrared light scattered by unusually large grains of dust in the denser core regions of molecular clouds and which evidently begin their growth before the start of cloud collapse. These clouds which are opaque to visible light, are a mixture of gas and dust and are the regions where stars are formed. Coreshine offers a new tool for observing the earliest phases of star formation, a process effectively hidden up to now. The scattered mid-infrared light, found throughout our galaxy, could reveal the origins of the cloud material, the size and density of the dust particles, the age of the core region, the distribution of the dust and gas, and the chemical processes taking place deep inside the cloud. The phenomenon was first studied seriously with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Researchers Laurent Pagani ( CNRS, Paris Observatory), Jürgen Steinacker (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy) and colleagues from the California Institute of Techno ...
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