Representatives from the University of Canterbury for the first time managed to capture a jet from a young massive star from a foreign galaxy. Anne MacLeod of the School of Physical and Chemical Sciences says that this discovery contributes significantly to the study of the process of star birth.
Massive stars are important, as they regulate the formation of new stellar generations, as well as the evolution of entire galaxies. The new discovery captures a massive star in the process of its formation, which sheds light on the details of the mechanism.
Dr. MacLeod is the lead author. She reported that the jet stream is pulled out for 36 light years, which makes it one of the largest among those found. The star that feeds the jet exceeds solar massiveness by 12 times.
For the study used information from the Very Large Telescope (Chile) - one of the largest optical telescopes in the world. The path of star formation resembles a solar one, but our star does not belong to the category of massive (8 times higher than the solar mass).
The center of the research is a young and still developing massive star releasing a bipolar jet. The accretion disk is also visible here - the disk around the stellar equator, from which the object receives matter and grows. Why is discovery important? Dr. MacLeod cites several reasons:
- This gives direct evidence of the accretion formation scenario for massive stars. That is, we see that massive stars form just like low-mass objects.
- This is the first discovery of a jet from a massive, young, stellar object, recorded outside the Milky Way.
- Within our galaxy, most of the bright young objects moving in a jet, therefore, remain invisible to optical telescopes. But this is the first jet, which was able to notice.
- The total length of the jet is 36 light years, which makes it one of the longest.
- The method of jet identification is unique, because only with the device used to receive data (MUSE on MBT) can this be done. Conventional tools did not produce results.
