Newly discovered star unlocks the secret of massive star formation

Astronomers recently hit the jackpot when they discovered a massive star still in the process of forming.

Measuring about 30 times the size of our Sun and still growing, the star could help scientists learn about how some of the biggest stars in the Universe form, according to a new report in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In our galaxy, massive young stars, those with a mass greater than eight times the Sun’s, are much more challenging to study than smaller stars. These big stars live fast and die young, causing them to be hard to find among the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. They’re also typically found much further away.

“An average star like our Sun is formed over a few million years, whereas massive stars are formed orders of magnitude faster — around 100,000 years,” John Ilee, an astronomer with the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, said in a news release. “These massive stars also burn through their fuel much more quickly, so they have shorter overall lifespans, making them harder to catch when they are infants.”

Found in a Dark Cloud

The young star identified in the study is located in an infrared dark cloud, a cold, dense area of space that makes an ideal stellar nursery. However, this rich star-forming area is challenging to observe using standard telescopes, since young stars are encompassed by a dense, opaque cloud of gas and dust. Using the Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii and the Karl G Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, the scientists could peer through the cloud and into the stellar nursery in the infrared part of the spectrum.

By measuring the quantity of radiation released by cold dust near the star, and by using distinctive fingerprints of various molecules in the gas, the scientists could pick up on the inclusion of a ‘Keplerian’ disc, a gas and dust disc which spins more rapidly at its middle than at its edge.

“This type of rotation is also seen in the Solar System – the inner planets rotate around the Sun more quickly than the outer planets,” Ilee said. “It’s exciting to find such a disc around a massive young star, because it suggests that massive stars form in a similar way to lower mass stars, like our Sun.”

In addition to calculating the mass of the young star to be more than 30 times the mass of the Sun, the study team also found the disc surrounding it to be between two and three times the mass of our Sun.

“Our theoretical calculations suggest that the disc could in fact be hiding even more mass under layers of gas and dust,” said Duncan Forgan, from the University of St Andrews in the UK. “The disc may even be so massive that it can break up under its own gravity, forming a series of less massive companion protostars.”

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Image credit:  A. Smith, Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge

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