An artist's impression of the young star and dusty disk.
With the help of Nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have now realised that the big guys of the universe, the most massive stars, do indeed form just like their smaller stellar neighbours.
Gas and dust in an interstellar cloud very slowly starts to coalese, clumping together into knots of denser material. These knots attract more and more dust and other material increasing it’s gravity, and over time this dust eventually starts to spin. This spinning action greates a flattened disk of material called a protoplanetary disk with the forming new sun at the centre, almost like a galaxy in miniture. The centre of this dusty disk attracts more and more stuff, as material spirals inwards.
The heart of the disk gets hotter and hotter until finally nuclear fusion is reached and a new star is born. The blast of ultraviolet light and fierce stellar winds from the baby star blow the lighter material from the central region revealing the shining sun and newly forming orbiting planets that were built from material much further out.
This is the way we know how a star and a potential new solar system is formed from of the raw materials of the cosmos. This has held true for smaller stars, but just how much weightier stars formed has always been much more of a mystery, as they’re usually hidden behind veils of dust and reside at greater distances from us. Also it’s not been fully understood of how stars larger than around 10 solar masses come about. Because their stellar winds and ultra violet radiation will tend to blow away gas and dust far from the star, preventing the accumulation of further material that would add mass.
A star at 20 times the mass of our Sun and at 10,000 light years away has been studied by astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. Around this massive star is a giant disk of gas and dust that encircles it. Astronomers were able to get a clear image of this star by cleverly combining the light from different telescopes and getting an image as if they’d been using a telescope with an 85 metre mirror.
Giant young star IRAS 13481-6124 shines brightly at upper left in this image from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Image credit NASA
The results have been confirmed by Nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope, and what they found was exactly the same process as around smaller stars…except everything is scaled up to XXL. Even oppositely opposing jets of material erupting from above and below the plane were confirmed, the same as what has been studied around smaller stars.
We are witnessing the “baby steps” of this particular star, and we know just how it’s life will be…fast and furious. Big suns like these are violent beasts, eating through their reserves of fuel at a rapid rate over just tens of millions of years. Star IRAS 13481-6124 at the end of it’s relatively short existance, will likely end up as an object often depicted in science fiction, an entity that lives at a place that is beyond our understanding…a black hole.
