Latest Protostar Stories

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Using observations from an airborne observatory, NASA researchers have discovered new details on how massive stars form within a cloud of interstellar gas and dust. An emerging star known as G35 has been observed forming in an orderly process similar to the one undergone by smaller stars like our sun, according to the scientists’ report in the Astrophysical Journal. Lead author Yichen Zhang said the observations of G35 made with...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Some of the youngest stars ever seen have recently been found, thanks to the European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory. Herschel's observations were used in conjunction with contributing observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile -- a collaboration involving the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIFR) in Germany, the Onsala Space Observatory...

WASHINGTON, March 19, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Astronomers have found some of the youngest stars ever seen thanks to the Herschel space observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA contributions. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) Observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile, a collaboration involving the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, the...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The youngest still-forming solar system ever seen has been discovered by astronomers and reported about in the journal Nature. Astronomers found an infant star surrounded by a swirling disk of dust and gas more than 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. The star has about one-fifth the mass of the Sun, but the scientists say it will likely pull in material from its surroundings to eventually match the Sun's mass....

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A team from Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) has observed the earliest stages of star formation using the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory. The astronomers were able to produce a three-dimensional map of the molecular cloud B68, a possible birthplace for a low-mass star. They managed to also identify a previously unobserved class of object that could be the earliest known precursor of the birth of massive...

Astronomers have glimpsed what could be the youngest known star at the very moment it is being born. Not yet fully developed into a true star, the object is in the earliest stages of star formation and has just begun pulling in matter from a surrounding envelope of gas and dust, according to a new study that appears in the current issue of the Astrophysical Journal.The study's authors"”who include astronomers from Yale University, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Max...

A Proton-M rocket carrying a ProtoStar-2 telecommunication satellite was launched from the Baikonur space center Saturday, the Russian space agency said. The launch of the Proton-M rocket fitted with a Breeze-M booster and carrying a ProtoStar-2 telecommunication satellite went ahead at the scheduled time, a Roscosmos spokesperson was quoted by RIA Novosti as saying. The Russian news service said the Proton-M rocket launch is the fourth this year carried out by International Launch Services...

A team of astronomers from the Instituto Astrofisica Canarias (IAC) have found an interesting shadow cast by a forming star system. Team member Dr Basmah Riaz, an ER fellow for the Marie Curie CONSTELLATION network, will present the results of their work on Thursday 23rd April in a poster at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science conference at the University of Hertfordshire.In March 2008 the scientists observed the young star (protostar) system 2M171123 in the B59 molecular cloud,...

SANTA CRUZ, CA -- Theorists have long wondered how massive stars--up to 120 times the mass of the Sun--can form without blowing away the clouds of gas and dust that feed their growth. But the problem turns out to be less mysterious than it once seemed. A study published this week by Science shows how the growth of a massive star can proceed despite outward-flowing radiation pressure that exceeds the gravitational force pulling material inward. The new findings also explain why massive stars...

For several decades, scientists have thought that the Solar System formed as a result of a shock wave from an exploding star "” a supernova "” that triggered the collapse of a dense, dusty gas cloud that contracted to form the Sun and the planets. But detailed models of this formation process have only worked under the simplifying assumption that the temperatures during the violent events remained constant. Now, astrophysicists at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial...