Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: UNAWE Space Scoop – High – Speed Baby Star Tantrums
Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : http://365daysofastronomy.org/ ; https://spacescoop.org/en/scoops/2125/this-one-winged-cosmic-butterfly-holds-a-baby-star/
Description: Space scoop, news for children.
Baby stars form when thick clouds of gas and dust fall into themselves or collapse due to gravity. Not all of the material collapses to form a baby star.
A new study shows that some gas can escape at a high speed, which astrophysicists call a high-speed outflow. Because most stars form in large groups, theory predicts that some of these high-speed outflows of gas, coming from a star-forming cloud, can mix with another cloud nearby. This mixing can possibly affect the star formation in the nearby cloud.
Bio: Richard Drumm is President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society and President of 3D – Drumm Digital Design, a video production company with clients such as Kodak, Xerox and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. He was an observer with the UVa Parallax Program at McCormick Observatory in 1981 & 1982. He has found that his greatest passion in life is public outreach astronomy and he pursues it at every opportunity.
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Transcript:
This is the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. Today we bring you a new episode in our Space Scoop series. This show is produced in collaboration with Universe Awareness, a program that strives to inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.
Today’s story is…
High – Speed Baby Star Tantrums
Little fights between siblings over toys or candy are quite common in human households.
In most cases, parents settle those adorable little disputes by making the kids share things.
It’s an entirely different story when the siblings are baby stars and their home is a star forming cloud in the Orion constellation! Baby stars form when thick clouds of gas and dust fall into themselves or collapse due to gravity.
Not all of the material collapses to form a baby star.
A new study shows that some gas can escape at a high speed, which astrophysicists call a high-speed outflow.
Because most stars form in large groups, theory predicts that some of these high-speed outflows of gas, coming from a star-forming cloud, can mix with another cloud nearby.
This mixing can possibly affect the star formation in the nearby cloud.
Until recently, it was quite challenging for astronomers to confirm this prediction as the star forming groups are located quite far away from Earth. Using the mighty ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array radio telescope, astronomers from the Kyushu University in Japan took a closer look at a region in the constellation Orion.
This is an area about 1,400 light-years away where large groups of stars, called protoclusters, are being born.
To their excitement, the astronomers saw an outflow of gas coming from a baby star, in a region known as FIR 3, that was hitting the nearby, star-forming, FIR 4 region, creating layers of energetic disturbances or ‘shock layers’.
By the way, FIR means Far Infra Red, the wavelength of light that is very good at penetrating dust clouds.
That baby star is called HOPS-370, and is one of the most luminous protostars in the Orion Molecular Cloud star forming region.
HOPS stands for Haystack Observatory Postprocessing System, which is a software package for processing the raw data from radio astronomy antennas.
The Japanese team observed in the 1.3 mm wavelength and detected CO, carbon monoxide and SiO, silicon monoxide radio emissions coming from the cloud.
The CO is part of the gas and the SiO is part of what we call “dust”, the part that some day will form rocky planets like Earth.
There were 3 possible scenarios that were proposed to explain the protocluster’s origin:
1. An interaction of the outflow of gasses & dust.
2. Internal heating from an imbedded class B star.
3. Heating from irradiation by Far Ultra-Violet light.
These observations of both gas & dust showed that the first option, the outflow of gas & dust from HOPS-370, was responsible for the origin of the protocluster.
With the new observations, astronomers can now further study whether this stellar sibling fight has a positive or negative effect on forming new stars.
Hey, here’s a cool fact!
ALMA is a giant radio telescope array situated in the Atacama desert in Chile at a height of 5,000 meters above sea level.
That’s 5 kilometers up in the altiplano or high plane between mountains!
It’s a powerful telescope that can capture high quality images of very weak radio waves that hold clues to star and planet formation and also the building blocks of life.
The dust and gas clouds the Japanese team observed were composed of 51 discreet radio sources, 36 of which had never been detected before!
The individual radio sources had masses ranging from 12 1/2 times Earth’s mass to 3,300 times Earth!
The Orion Giant Molecular Cloud star forming region is like a busy construction site.
And HOPS-370 is like a bulldozer!
Thank you for listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast!
365 Days of Astronomy
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