NASA News #2 An Evolving Mystery

It's a slow week for NASA news, but last week they ran an article on the space-based Spitzer infrared telescope, due to be retired next month. The article covered new observations made of a region of the Perseus Molecular Cloud. The following quotes come from a section titled An Evolving Mystery.

Other clusters of stars seen below NGC 1333 in this image have posed a fascinating mystery for astronomers: They appear to contain stellar infants, adolescents and adults. Such a closely packed mixture of ages is extremely odd, according to Luisa Rebull, an astrophysicist at NASA's Infrared Science Archive at Caltech-IPAC who has studied NGC 1333 and some of the clusters below it. Although many stellar siblings may form together in tight clusters, stars are always moving, and as they grow older they tend to move farther and farther apart.

Finding such a closely packed mixture of apparent ages doesn't fit with current ideas about how stars evolve. "This region is telling astronomers that there's something we don't understand about star formation," said Rebull. The puzzle presented by this region is one thing that keeps astronomers coming back to it.

The stellar model is based on some assumptions about stars that may be false. There is no direct evidence to confirm the model either, nor is it clear how we could verify processes that act over billions of years. It is entirely possible that the stellar model is making many mis-classifications for what are new versus old stars. The important aspect of all this is that, as usual, new observations have contradicted consensus opinions.

Since IRAS's early observations, the region has come into clearer focus, a process that is common in astronomy, said Rebull. New instruments bring more sensitivity and new techniques, and the story becomes clearer with each new generation of observatories.

Technology allowing clearer imagery has not resulted in a clearer story. More observations mean more contradictions, more complexity, and more hand-wavy hypotheticals. And that is when the new evidence is considered at all. It is routine for missions launched at great expense to produce unpredicted results, then the scientists act surprised, and then nothing changes. Next they advocate for funding more missions, whereupon they will act surprised again and the cycle renews. The need for continued institutional optimism in the face of relentless failures has led to a form of doublespeak from the publicly funded academics. The more our predictions fail, the clearer the story becomes. It is assumed that more evidence leads to a clearer understanding, but that is not what is happening.