ALMA Reveals Turbulent Birth of Twin Baby Stars
http://www.almaobservatory.org/en/press ... aby-stars/
Friday 30 June 2017
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), researchers obtained a critical clue to an underlying problem: how are widely separated twin stars formed? The team found very low mass newborn twin stars with misaligned rotation axes. This misalignment indicates that they were formed in a pair of fragmented gas clouds produced through turbulence, not via evolution of tightly-coupled twin. This finding strongly supports the turbulent fragmentation theory of binary star formation down to the substellar regime.
An international team of astronomers led by Jeong-Eun Lee in Kyung Hee University, Korea, observed the baby twin star system IRAS 04191+1523 with ALMA. Thanks to the high resolution of ALMA, the team successfully imaged the rotation of the gas disks around the very low mass twin stars and found that the rotation axes of the two stars are misaligned.
“This revelation is particularly interesting because both baby stars’ masses derived from our ALMA data are about 10% of the solar mass, which is very low. The formation of very low mass wide binary stars has been a mystery. But our result is strong evidence that wide binaries of these very low mass stars and even brown dwarfs can form in the same way as normal stars via turbulent fragmentation.” said Lee.
Formation of Wide Binaries by Turbulent Fragmentation
Jeong-Eun Lee, Seokho Lee, Michael Dunham, Ken'ichi Tatematsu, Minho Choi, Edwin A. Bergin,Neal J. Evans II
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-017-0172
Published online 30 June 2017
Abstract
Understanding the formation of wide binary systems of very low mass stars (M ≤ 0.1 Msun) is challenging. The most obvious route is via widely separated low-mass collapsing fragments produced through turbulent fragmentation of a molecular core. However, close binaries/multiples from disk fragmentation can also evolve to wide binaries over a few initial crossing times of the stellar cluster through tidal evolution. Finding an isolated low mass wide binary system in the earliest stage of formation, before tidal evolution could occur, would prove that turbulent fragmentation is a viable mechanism for (very) low mass wide binaries. Here we report high resolution ALMA observations of a known wide-separation protostellar binary, showing that each component has a circumstellar disk. The system is too young to have evolved from a close binary and the disk axes are misaligned, providing strong support for the turbulent fragmentation model. Masses of both stars are derived from the Keplerian rotation of the disks; both are very low mass stars.
Available on the arXiv
https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.00233
