ALMA | NRAO | ESO | NAOJ | 2017 Apr 07
[img3="Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), J. Bally/H. Drass et al."]https://cdn.eso.org/images/thumb700x/eso1711a.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]Star birth can be a violent and explosive event, as dramatically illustrated in new ALMA images.
Around 500 years ago, a pair of adolescent protostars had a perilously close encounter that blasted their stellar nursery apart.
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have examined the widely scattered debris from this explosive event, gaining new insights into the sometimes-fierce relationship among sibling stars.
Shortly after starting to form some 100,000 years ago, several protostars in the Orion Molecular Cloud 1 (OMC-1), a dense and active star factory about 1,500 light-years from Earth just behind the Orion Nebula, latched onto each other gravitationally and gradually drew closer.
Eventually, two of these stars either grazed each other or collided, triggering a powerful eruption that launched other nearby protostars and hundreds of giant streamers of dust and gas into interstellar space at speeds greater than 150 kilometers per second. This cataclysmic interaction released as much energy as our Sun emits over the course of 10 million years.
Today, the remains of this spectacular explosion are visible from Earth. ...
ALMA Captures Dramatic Stellar Fireworks
ESO Photo Release | 2017 Apr 07
The ALMA View of the OMC1 Explosion in Orion - John Bally et al
- Astrophysical Journal 837(1):60 (2017 Mar 01) DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aa5c8b
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1701.01906 > 08 Jan 2017 (v1), 01 Feb 2017 (v3)