Newly Formed Stars Shoot Out Powerful Whirlwinds
In a recent publication in Nature researchers describe their discovery of what the forming of an early solar system looks like. Their observations were made on a young protostar about 450 light years away from Earth. A protostar is one which is still in the process of forming out of it's parent gas cloud.
Stars form by the collapsing of these large clouds of gas and dust due to gravitational forces that get larger as the mass of the star increases (aka, the collapsing of the cloud creates a feed back loop which in turn causes more of the cloud to collapse).
The researchers describe how winds which are "tornado like" lift gasses upward from the rotating disk of matter around the young star (the part that will eventually become the star's solar system). Researchers had previously thought that these tornado like winds originated from the center and move outward, however in the publication discussed here they found that is not true.
Instead they observed that the winds are distributed across the entirety of the spinning disk. This has two effects, first it slows down the rotation rate of the protostar and helps keep the star from ripping itself apart as it continues to pull in more matter and get larger, and secondly, it spreads the material from the disk around the cloud out further and allows for formation of the solar system surrounding the star.
The article below has some really cool videos of an artists rendition of what this looks like sped up, I recommend giving them a look, they are brief. Who doesn't love learning more about space!?
For more information check out this phys.org writeup:
http://phys.org/news/2016-12-newly-stars-powerful-whirlwinds.html
Or dive into the primary article:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v540/n7633/full/nature20600.html
Really cool and interesting @justtryme90
I thought so too :)
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