CSIRO: Telescope Spots Mega-Star Cradle

[bystander]

CSIRO Telescope Spots Mega-Star Cradle
CSIRO 10/53 - 29 April 2010

Using a CSIRO radio telescope, an international team of researchers has caught an enormous cloud of cosmic gas and dust in the process of collapsing in on itself – a discovery which could help solve one of astronomy’s enduring conundrums: ‘How do massive stars form?’
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Massive stars are rare, making up only a few per cent of all stars, and they will only form in significant numbers when really massive clouds of gas collapse, creating hundreds of stars of different masses. Smaller gas clouds are not likely to make big stars.

Accordingly, regions in space where massive stars seem to be forming are also rare. Most are well over 1000 light-years away, making them hard to observe.

Using CSIRO’s ‘Mopra’ radio telescope – a 22m dish near Coonabarabran, NSW – the research team discovered a massive cloud of mostly hydrogen gas and dust, three or more light-years across, that is collapsing in on itself and will probably form a huge cluster of stars.
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The gas cloud, called BYF73, is about 8,000 light years away, in the constellation of Carina (“the keel”) in the Southern sky.
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The CSIRO telescope observations were confirmed by observations with the Atacama Submillimeter Telescope Experiment (ATSE) telescope in Chile.
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Follow-up infrared observations made with the 3.9-m Anglo-Australian Telescope (also near Coonabarabran, NSW) showed signs of massive young stars that have already formed right at the centre of the gas clump, and new stars forming.

Star-formation in the cloud was also evident in archival data from the Spitzer and MSX spacecraft, which observe in the mid-infrared.

Mid-infrared image of BYF 73 from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The yellowish wisps to the right are remnants of gas that have been heated and are being driven off by the massive young stars within them (seen in blue). The large-scale collapse of colder gas to form a massive cluster is centred around the bright stars just to the left of the heated wisps. (Spitzer/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Discovery of large-scale gravitational infall in a massive protostellar cluster

• Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society,
  Volume 402 Issue 1, Pages 73 - 86, 23 Dec 2009,
  DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2009.15890.x
  
  Free Preprint: arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:0812.1789
  (Submitted: 09 Dec 2008 (v1), Last Revised: 20 Oct 2009 (v3))

[neufer]

CSIRO Telescope Spots Mega-Star Cradle
CSIRO 10/53 - 29 April 2010

Using a CSIRO radio telescope, an international team of researchers has caught an enormous cloud of cosmic gas and dust in the process of collapsing in on itself – a discovery which could help solve one of astronomy’s enduring conundrums: ‘How do massive stars form?’
...
The gas cloud, called BYF73, is about 8,000 light years away, in the constellation of Carina (“the keel”).

Mid-infrared image of BYF 73 from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The yellowish wisps to the right are remnants of gas that have been heated and are being driven off by the massive young stars within them (seen in blue). The large-scale collapse of colder gas to form a massive cluster is centred around the bright stars just to the left of the heated wisps. (Spitzer/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

• • James Joyce » Ulysses » Episode 3 - Proteus
  Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.

[bystander]

Astronomers Plan Second Look at Mega Star Birthing Grounds
Science Daily - 10 May 2010

Astronomers this summer will take a close look at a rare cosmic cradle for the universe's largest stars, baby bruisers that grow up to have 50 times the sun's mass.
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The latest findings, ... , have spurred the team to plan a closer look with another Australian telescope in August. The team will also use the Gemini South telescope, equipped with a mid-infrared camera designed and built at UF, to observe the cloud from the telescope's location in Chile.