ASTRONOMS FOR THE FIRST TIME COULD SEE AND IMPRESS THE EXPLOSION OF A NEWBORN STAR
The collision of two newborn stars in a giant stellar nursery in the constellation of Orion gave rise to a powerful cosmic "fireworks", the energy of which would be enough for the Sun to shine for 10 million years.
The Gemini telescope image shows clouds of hydrogen (shown in yellow) and regions containing many iron atoms (in blue). Photo: ALMA (ESO / NAOJ / NRAO), J. Bally / H. Drass et al “Such explosions of protostars are extremely transient, but they can quite often occur inside the 'stellar nursery'. By exploding the clouds of gas in which they are born, such "proto-supernovae" can act as one of the limiters of the growth rate of stars in such giant stellar nurseries, "said John Bally of the University of Colorado at Boulder (USA).
The Orion Nebula, or cloud, is one of the largest stellar nurseries in the galaxy. It is located about 1,500 light years from Earth and spans several hundred light years. Here, tens and hundreds of young luminaries are formed, some of which have a rather unusual appearance and properties to attract the attention of scientists.
Bally and his colleagues observed one of the central parts of this cloud, known to scientists as OMC-1, which contains about 100 times more gas than the sun weighs.
About 100 thousand years ago, new luminaries began to form in it, many of which are located so close to each other that their gravitational forces begin to influence each other. Two such embryos, as shown by images from the ALMA telescope, the largest microwave radio observatory in the world on the Chilean plateau Chahnantor, approached each other about 500 years ago and, presumably, collided, creating a powerful flash and dispersing all the gas of the nebula.
Such was the force of this collision and the power of the explosion that followed it that the gas of the former nebula is now moving at a speed of 150 kilometers per second away from the epicenter of this "fireworks", which is approximately equal to the speed with which the Sun revolves around the center of the Galaxy.
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The stars themselves, as these photographs show, survived this collision and are now scattering at speeds of about 13 and 29 kilometers per second.
The traces of this explosion are now clearly visible in both optical and microwave images of the nebula, but in a few hundred years, according to astronomers, they will completely disappear and become invisible to us. Such explosions, according to Bally and his colleagues now, can occur in "stellar nurseries" quite often, which explains why the frequency of birth of stars in some of them is much lower than theoretical values.
“People in most cases believe that only older luminaries can end their lives in an explosion, like the outbursts of new and supernova stars. The ALMA telescope has shown that similar things can happen at the opposite end of the life cycle of stars,”concludes Bally.
The study is published in the Astrophysical Journal.
With respect,
Ilona Krumplevskaya