Category Archives: star formation

JWST Catches a Protostar in the Act

On the heels of that amazingly successful Artemis-1 launch to the Moon, the JWST teams have just dropped an amazing image of a protostar. It’s an infrared view of the object L1527, which is a dark cloud of gas and dust with a future star just starting to form inside.

As you look at the image, you can see some pretty interesting features. The protostar is hidden at the center and the cloud of gas and dust it’s buried in is about the size of our solar system. The object is lighting up the clouds of gas and dust stretching away from it. Amazingly, you can also see caverns and filaments inside the cloud. Those are all regions where the material being ejected from the newborn star is sculpting the cloud.

Now, this protostar is pretty young—maybe only about 100,000 years old. It’s not actually a fully-fledged star yet. That’s going to take some time before nuclear fusion ignites at its core. Before that happens, materials in the thick birth cloud will continue to coalesce toward the center. They’re drawn by the gravity of the forming star.

As the material falls in, it creates a dense accretion disk that will keep feeding the infant star. As it gains more mass and compresses further, the temperature at the protostar’s core will rise. Eventually, things will get hot enough and the pressure high enough that nuclear fusion will ignite.

A Star Is Born (or Will Be)

So, in a few tens of thousands or a million years, this area of the sky will welcome a new star. The cool thing is that there are a lot more places like this in the galaxy for JWST to study. That means a lot more data for astronomers to study as they seek to understand the process of star birth.

JWST is the latest of the world’s space telescopes to take its turn showing us the universe, particularly in infrared wavelengths. Its first images of the distant universe began flowing back to Earth for analysis earlier this year.

Read more about this image and its details here.

Orion’s Pebbled Pathway to Stars and Planets

Radio Astronomy Reveals a Long and Winding Road in Space

Radio/optical composite of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex showing the OMC-2/3 star-forming filament. GBT data is shown in orange. Uncommonly large dust grains there may kick-start planet formation. Credit: S. Schnee, et al.; B. Saxton, B. Kent (NRAO/AUI/NSF); We acknowledge the use of NASA’s SkyView Facility located at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Wow!  Check out this latest image of the Orion Nebula!

Just when you think astronomy can’t get any cooler, something like this comes out: radio astronomers using the Green Bank Telescope (a radio telescope in West Virginia) have found filaments of star-forming gas near the Orion Nebula. Embedded in those filaments are what they think could be large grains of rocky material, the building blocks of planets.

If this discovery is held up through further observations, it would be the first time large particles — perhaps the size of a Lego-type building block — have been detected in such a dense super-nurturing star- and planet-forming nursery. Prior to this, regions of star birth were understood to be thick with dust-sized grains.  The existence of larger grains could change the dynamic of planet formation in this and other regions where larger particles exist.

Scott Schnee, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and lead on the team doing the work, pointed out that the availability of large-enough (pebble or Lego-sized) planetary building blocks would encourage the formation of planets around newborn stars in the region. “If you want to build a house, it’s best to start with bricks rather than gravel,” he said, implying that it would lead to faster building rates than normal.

Planet formation, similar to building a house, needs material to get started. Most planet nurseries start out with grains of material perhaps no larger than dust specks or maybe sand bits. Over time, those materials stick together to form larger and larger planetesimals, which collide to form planets. If you can start with bigger pieces, that might shorten the planet formation time.

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