STARSTRUCK
Multiple-Star Birth Revealed in Stellar Nursery
Quadruple-star system will emerge in 40,000 years.
Astronomers have have gotten their first good look at the beginnings of a quadruple-star system.
The discovery could LEAD
to a better understanding of why some stars, such as our sun, are loners, while many others are born into systems with two, three, or more stars.
to a better understanding of why some stars, such as our sun, are loners, while many others are born into systems with two, three, or more stars.
Using the combined power of two of the largest radio telescopes in the world—the Very Large Array (VLA) radio observatory in Socorro, New Mexico, and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia—along with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, a team of international scientists have observed the earliest stages of formation of the future four-star system.
The study, published February 11 in Nature, describes a cloud of gas called Barnard 5, or B5, located some 800 light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus. Nestled within the stellar nursery, a core of gas, scientists found one young protostar and three dense pockets of matter that they believe will collapse into stars in about 40,000 years—a blink of an eye in astronomical terms.
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