Star Formation Archives

January 14, 2023January 11, 2023 by Paul M. Sutter

Astronomers Spot an Orphaned Protostar

The HH 24 Complex (image credit: Reipurth et al.)

Astronomers have performed an impressive suite of observations at multiple wavelengths of the same system, dubbed the HH 24 complex. This complex hosts stars in the process of being born and the impacts of their violent interactions with each other, including the ejection of one of their siblings.

November 30, 2022November 30, 2022 by Evan Gough

It’s Feeding Time For This Baby Star in Orion

This new image of the Orion Nebula produced using previously released data from three telescopes shows two enormous caverns carved out by unseen giant stars that can release up to a million times more light than our Sun. All that radiation breaks apart dust grains there, helping to create the pair of cavities. Much of the remaining dust is swept away when the stars produce wind or when they die explosive deaths as supernovae. Image Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech

Young protostars are wrapped in what could be called a womb of gas and dust. The gas and dust nearest to them form a circumstellar disk as the stars grow. The disk is a reservoir of material that the star accretes as it grows.

But these stars don’t feed in a predictable rhythm. Sometimes, they experience feeding frenzies, periods of time they accrete lots of material from the disk at once. When that happens, they flare in bright bursts, “burping” as they absorb more material.

November 29, 2022November 29, 2022 by Evan Gough

Baby Gas Giants Cast Shadows on Their Siblings

A computer-generated image depicting a dark protostellar disk seen edge-on at 90 degrees to jets (orange) emanating from the poles of a young star. Such disks are thought to be the precursors of planetary systems, with planets forming as the dust coalesces. RIKEN researchers may have spotted embryos of gas giant planets in one protostellar disk. Credit: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library

A team of astronomers has caught glimpses of gas giants forming around a very young star.

The nascent giants are having a chilling effect on their potential siblings.

November 21, 2022November 21, 2022 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Hubble Sees a Dense Cloud of Gas and Dust That’s About to Become a Star

A small, dense cloud of gas and dust called CB 130-3 blots out the center of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. — A small, dense cloud of gas and dust called CB 130-3 blots out the centre of this HST image. Courtesy NASA/ESA/STScI

The process of star birth begins in a shroud of gas and dust. Hubble Space Telescope (HST) excels in showing detailed views of these stellar crêches because there’s still a lot to learn about them. Its latest image shows an object called a “dense core”, where a stellar embryo could already exist.

November 17, 2022November 17, 2022 by Evan Gough

The Latest JWST Image Shows a Star in the Earliest Stage of Formation

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has revealed the once-hidden features of the protostar within the dark cloud L1527 with its Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), providing insight into the formation of a new star. These blazing clouds within the Taurus star-forming region are only visible in infrared light, making it an ideal target for Webb. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI, J. DePasquale (STScI), CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

What’s the most exciting thing about the James Webb Space Telescope? The stunning images? The completion of its torturous path from concept to launch?

Or is it because it provides such compelling visual evidence of objects and processes long theorized about but difficult to observe?

October 30, 2022October 30, 2022 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Too Many Supernovae Can Slow Star Formation in a Galaxy

star formation regions in M33 are disrupted by cosmic-ray driven winds — Artist's illustration of cosmic ray-driven winds (blue and green) superimposed on a visible-light image of the Triangulum galaxy M33 (red and white) observed with VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. Credit: Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences- IPM & European Southern Observatory (ESO)

Interstellar winds are powerful agents of change. For one thing, they can interrupt or shut down the process of star birth completely. That’s what a team of astronomers using the Karl Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico found when they studied the galaxy M33. They also learned that speedy cosmic rays play a huge role in pushing those winds across interstellar space.

October 29, 2022October 29, 2022 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Another Version of the Pillars of Creation from Webb

The hits just keep on streaming back to Earth from James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This time, arriving to help celebrate Hallowe’en, data from the MIRI mid-infrared instrument onboard JWST shows another view of the Pillars of Creation. Thousands of stars are embedded in those pillars, but many are “invisible” to MIRI.

October 25, 2022October 25, 2022 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Hubble Looks at Newly Forming Stars in a Stellar Nursery

stellar nurseries and jets — The lives of newborn stars are tempestuous, as this image of the Herbig–Haro objects HH 1 and HH 2 from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope depicts.

When we look at images of star birth regions, they look both placid and active at the same time. That’s nowhere more true than in a stellar nursery associated with a so-called “Herbig-Haro” object. A recent image from Hubble Space Telescope zeroed in on two called “HH 1” and “HH 2”. It looked at the turbulence associated with a nearby newborn star system.

October 23, 2022October 23, 2022 by Matt Williams

A Black Hole is Hurling a jet of Material at its Neighboring Galaxy

Artist view of an active supermassive black hole. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

It’s been a banner time for black hole research! In recent months, astrophysicists have announced the discovery of the most powerful gamma-ray burst ever recorded (due to the formation of a black hole), a monster black hole in our cosmic backyard, the frame-dragging effects of a binary black hole, and the remains of the 2017 Kilonova event (spoiler alert: it was a black hole). And with the help of citizen scientists, a team of astronomers recently discovered a unique black hole in a galaxy roughly one billion light-years away that’s hurling a relativistic jet at another galaxy.

September 17, 2022September 12, 2022 by Paul M. Sutter

The First cry From a Brand new Baby Star

With its helical appearance resembling a snail’s shell, this reflection nebula seems to spiral out from a luminous central star in this new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. The star in the centre, known as V1331 Cyg and located in the dark cloud LDN 981 — or, more commonly, Lynds 981 — had previously been defined as a T Tauri star. A T Tauri is a young star — or Young Stellar Object — that is starting to contract to become a main sequence star similar to the Sun. What makes V1331Cyg special is the fact that we look almost exactly at one of its poles. Usually, the view of a young star is obscured by the dust from the circumstellar disc and the envelope that surround it. However, with V1331Cyg we are actually looking in the exact direction of a jet driven by the star that is clearing the dust and giving us this magnificent view. This view provides an almost undisturbed view of the star and its immediate surroundings allowing astronomers to study it in greater detail and look for features that might suggest the formation of a verylow-mass object in the outer circumstellar disc.

The early universe was a much different place than our own, and astronomers do not fully understand how baby stars grew up in that environment. And while instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope will pierce back into the earliest epochs of star formation, we don’t always have to work so hard – there may be clues closer to home.