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Astronomers have solved the mystery of giant stars: they form in a completely different way than small stars


A team of astronomers from the Netherlands the day before yesterday, May 10, published a scientific article in the Astrophysical Journal that high-mass stars do not form like their smaller “cousins”. While small stars are often surrounded by an ordered disk formed from dust and matter, the matter around large stars is a chaotic mess.

Scientists said that at the moment the process of creating small young stars is quite well understood – they relatively orderly accumulate matter from a disk formed from gas and dust. Astronomers around the world have seen these discs around young, low-mass stars many times, but young stars have never had a large mass of these discs. It is because of this feature that the question arose of how exactly these cosmic bodies arise, and whether large stars arise in the same way as small ones.

“Our findings and observations provide strong evidence that the answer to this question is ‘No’,” said Ciriaco Goddi, an expert at Leiden University.

Goddy led a team that studied three young, high-mass stars in the W51 star-forming region, about 17,000 light-years from Earth. Scientists were looking for stable discs that spew out jets of matter perpendicular to the surface of the disc. However, instead of these stable disks, astronomers found that the accretion zone for young, high-mass stars looks like chaotic disorder. Judging by the observations made, gas jets are directed towards the young star from all sides, forming a completely chaotic model – large stars, at least in the first years of their existence, are formed by matter coming from different directions and with an irregular speed.

“This unstructured formation model was previously proposed based on computer simulations, and now we have the first observational data to support this model,” added Goddy.

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