Baby star fires powerful jets of water into space
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Baby star blasts jets of water into space
A protostar is a large mass that forms by contraction out of the gas of a giant molecular cloud in the interstellar medium. The protostellar phase is an early stage in the process of star formation. For a one solar-mass star it lasts about 100,000 years although there is much speculation as to its duration. It starts with a core of increased density in a molecular cloud and ends with the formation of a T Tauri star, which then develops into a main sequence star. This is heralded by the T Tauri wind, a type of super solar wind that marks the change from the star accreting mass into radiating energy.
Astronomers have found a nascent star 750 light years from earth that shoots colossal jets of water — a cosmic fire hose — out its poles in bullet-like pulses.
Artists impression of a protostar by Fraser Cain on February 4, 2009
In a explosive process that virtually defies adjectives and analogies, each jet of water is the equivalent of a hundred million times the water flowing through the Amazon River every second and the speed of the jet is the equivalent of 80 times the muzzle velocity of an AK-47 assault rifle.
The blast creates huge shockwaves around the star and the process may be responsible for sprinkling the universe with water.
And it could go on for a thousand years in each star. Astronomers think all baby stars go through this process as they form, and that our sun did also.
The protostar was found in the Perseus constellation in an object called L1448-MM, seen from the earth to the right of the Pleiades, also called the Seven Sisters cluster of stars, in the constellation of Taurus. It is called a low-mass protostar, meaning it is just beginning to grow into a star.
While jets like that have been seen in other baby stars, astronomers, using the European Space Agency’’s Herschel infrared orbiting telescope were able to measure the flow of the jets using water molecules as the tracer.
Lars E. Kristensen, a postdoctoral student at the Leiden University in the Netherlands, an author of the paper, said that all stars are formed by the accretion of dust and other particles in interstellar space and are eventually surrounded by a disk of material that falls into the star as it builds.
The disks are something like the rings of Saturn but far less well-defined, he said, “more puffy.”
Material that is not used by the forming star is blasted back out into space from the poles, perpendicular to the angle of the disks.
“We don’’t know the launching point or the exact launching mechanism,” Kristensen said. “There is no self-consistent theory that can explain what we are seeing.”
No one knows how long this process lasts. Eventually, the star reaches maturity and has acquired all the material it needs and the whole process of making a star shuts down, which could be anywhere from one to ten million years.
“We’ve known about these jets before,” said astronomer Mark Krumholz of the University of California at Santa Cruz, who was not part of the research team, but the measurement “is far more precise.” Krumholz agrees that all stars go through this birth process and said that the use of water as a tracer gives astronomers a handy tool to measure these jets.
Many thanks to Joel N. Shurkin for parts of this story originally provided by Inside Science News Service.
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This makes me wish I had gone into astronomy after all…
Me too!
Absolutely incredible. Thanks for sharing.