University of Cambridge | 2016 Aug 21
A young star over 30 times more massive than the Sun could help us understand how the most extreme stars in the Universe are born.
[img3="Artist’s impression of the disc and outflow around the massive young starAstronomers have identified a young star, located almost 11,000 light years away, which could help us understand how the most massive stars in the Universe are formed. This young star, already more than 30 times the mass of our Sun, is still in the process of gathering material from its parent molecular cloud, and may be even more massive when it finally reaches adulthood. ...
Credit: A. Smith, Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge"]https://www.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.cam.ac. ... rtists.png[/img3][hr][/hr]
In our galaxy, massive young stars – those with a mass at least eight times greater than the Sun – are much more difficult to study than smaller stars. This is because they live fast and die young, making them rare among the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, and on average, they are much further away. ...
The protostar that Ilee and his colleagues identified resides in an infrared dark cloud - a very cold and dense region of space which makes for an ideal stellar nursery. However, this rich star-forming region is difficult to observe using conventional telescopes, since the young stars are surrounded by a thick, opaque cloud of gas and dust. But by using the Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii and the Karl G Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, both of which use relatively long wavelengths of light to observe the sky, the researchers were able to ‘see’ through the cloud and into the stellar nursery itself. ...
G11.92-0361 MM1: A Keplerian Disc Around a Massive Young Proto O-Star - J.D. Ilee et al
- Monthly Notices of the RAS (online 2016 Aug 09) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stw1912
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1608.05561 > 19 Aug 2016
- Monthly Notices of the RAS (online 2016 Aug 09) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stw1917
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1608.05539 > 19 Aug 2016