The Lupus Cloud is a nearby dark cloud in the southern constellation Lupus where small, Sun-like stars are forming quietly, without any massive stars among them.
At a glance
| type | nebula |
|---|---|
| distance from the Sun | 506 light-years (155 pc) |
| its light left it | 506 years ago |
| size in the piece | about 52 light-years acrossmodel |
Read off the piece’s own catalogue, the same values it draws with. Model marks a property of the piece’s galaxy model rather than a measurement.
About Lupus Cloud
The dark clouds of Lupus lie on the edge of the Scorpius–Centaurus association, the nearest group of young massive stars. They are made of cold molecular gas and dust, dense enough to block the light of the stars behind them and to collapse into new stars of their own.
Star formation here is of the gentle kind: mostly low-mass stars, many of them T Tauri stars still contracting and surrounded by discs of gas and dust from which planets may form. Infrared and millimetre surveys of those discs make Lupus one of the reference regions for studying planet formation. The piece also carries a wider entry, the Lupus Clouds, for the complex as a whole.
What you see in the piece
In visible light it shows up only by what it hides, a patch where background stars thin out; the infrared band shows the dust itself glowing.
Questions
How far away is the Lupus Cloud?
The Lupus Cloud is about 506 light-years (155 pc) from the Sun.
What kind of stars form in Lupus?
Mostly small, Sun-like and smaller stars; there are no massive stars forming there, and many of the young stars still have discs.