The Milky Way's newborns: Herschel telescope reveals galaxy's youngest stars

Brilliant multicolor images from the powerful new Herschel telescope reveal the youngest stars ever before seen, The Daily Mail reports.

The newly-discovered protostars are in the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, an area of space where astronomers have previously looked for the birth of stars.

However, the sensitive infrared camera aboard the European Space Agency's relatively new Herschel Space Observatory was able to identify even younger and colder stars than other telescopes.

The 15 budding stars are mere infants by cosmic standards - some of them in stages of formation that last only 25,000 years. Our own solar system is an estimated 4.6billion years old.

Eleven of the new stars emitted red colors picked up by Herschel's spectrometer, meaning that they are low energy and likely embedded in envelopes of cosmic gases, meaning they are especially young.