Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/ Lee et al.
This intriguing image may look like a collection of coloured blobs,
but it is actually a high-resolution snapshot of a newborn star
enshrouded in dust. Just 1300 light-years away in the Orion Nebula,
the star, named HH 212, is remarkably young. The average lifespan of
such a low-mass star is around 100 billion years, but this star is only
40 000 years old — truly an infant in stellar terms.
In the cores of the vast molecular clouds
in star formation regions, an ongoing battle rages; gravity versus the
pressure of gas and dust. If gravity wins, it forces the gas and dust to
collapse into a hot dense core that eventually ignites — forming a protostar.
All the leftover gas and dust form a spinning disc around this baby
star, and in many star systems they eventually coalesce to make planets.
Such very young protostellar discs have been hard to image because of
their relatively small size, but now the exceedingly high resolution of
the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) makes it possible to understand the intricate details of star and planet formation.
A
closer look at HH 212 reveals a prominent, cool, dark dust lane running
through the disc, sandwiched between two brighter regions that are
heated by the protostar. The result resembles a cosmic “hamburger”. This
is the very first time astronomers have spotted such a dust lane in the
earliest phases of star formation, and so it may provide clues as to
how planetary systems are born.
Source: ESO/Potw
