Adler: New Ways Developed to See the Formation of Stars

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Adler: New Ways Developed to See the Formation of Stars

Post by bystander » Thu Jul 20, 2017 5:33 pm

Adler Planetarium Astronomer Develops New Ways to See the Formation
of Stars and Discovers Never-Before Seen Areas in Our Milky Way Galaxy

Adler Planetarium | 2017 Jul 20

A research team led by Adler Planetarium astronomer Dr. Grace Wolf-Chase has discovered new evidence of stars forming in our Milky Way Galaxy. By using a telescope equipped to detect infrared light invisible to our eyes, this exciting new science is revealing how stars, including our very own Sun, grow up within clusters and groups. ...

The team found huge gas clouds moving outward from areas where “baby” stars are forming, using a new way of disentangling these outflows from other processes in densely-populated stellar nurseries. These stellar nurseries can produce dozens or even hundreds of stars with different sizes and masses.

“The Sun, though isolated from other stars today, is thought to have formed in a cluster with many other stars, so the environments we’re studying can tell us a lot about the origin of our own solar system,” said Wolf-Chase.

Stars form when cold, rotating clouds of gas and dust in space are pulled together by gravity into flattened “disks” that spin faster as they shrink, similar to what happens when twirling figure skaters pull their outstretched arms in toward their bodies. In order for a star to form at the center of a spinning disk, the rotation of the disk must slow down. This happens through powerful outflows of gas that are channeled into tight streams, known as “jets.” Jets can span more than 10 trillion miles, even though the disks that launch them are “mere” billions of miles across (comparable to the size of our solar system). Since planets can form in the disks, the presence of a jet can be a good indicator of a nascent planetary system, even when the disk isn’t observed directly. Stars more than eight times as massive as the Sun bathe their surroundings in intense ultraviolet radiation that destroys their natal clouds quickly, so it’s not clear if these massive stars develop disks and jets similar to stars like the Sun. ...

MHOs Toward HMOs: A Search for Molecular Hydrogen Emission-Line Objects
Toward High-Mass Outflows
- Grace Wolf-Chase, Kim Arvidsson, Michael Smutko
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