- Click to share on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
- Click to share on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
- Click here to share on LinkedIn (Opens in a new window)
- Click to email a friend (Opens in a new window)
(CNN) - Scientists found and photographed two baby stars with unprecedented details between 600 and 700 light years from Earth. Each baby star is surrounded by a ring called a circumstellar disk, which is made of gas and dust that feeds the star and helps it grow.
These are the youngest stars within a cluster of stars found in the dark Barnard 59 nebula, also part of what is known as the Pipe nebula. It's called a dark nebula because here, dust clouds are so thick that they block starlight.
Previously, astronomers believed that there were regions of space without stars, but then discovered that dark nebulae only hid the starlight from our sight.
Barnard 59 forms the mouthpiece of the Pipe nebula, which is highlighted by the clouds of stars around it.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array, called ALMA, an international team of astronomers was able to look inside Barnard 59 and find this surprise that resembles a cosmic pretzel. Astronomers published their findings Thursday in the journal Science .
"We see two compact sources that we interpret as circumstellar discs around the two young stars," said Felipe Alves, author of the study and postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. "The size of each of these disks is similar to that of the asteroid belt in our Solar System and the separation between them is 28 times the distance between the Sun and the Earth."
LOOK : There is something that is preventing new stars from being created in our galaxy
Around both circumstellar discs there is a larger disc that helps create the pretzel shape. The mass of the disk is that of 80 times the mass of Jupiter, showing a complex spiral shape.
"This is a really important result," said Paola Caselli, co-author of the study and manager of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. “Finally we have imagined the complex structure of the young binary stars with their feeding filaments that connect them to the disk in which they were born. This provides important restrictions for current star formation models. ”
The stars are feeding the largest ring indirectly. The mass in the largest ring reaches the individual discs through the vibrant loops we see in the image. Then, the stars feed on their individual discs.
"We hope that this two-level growth process will boost the dynamics of the binary system during its massive growth phase," said Alves. "While the relationship of these observations to the theory is already very promising, we will need to study more young binary systems in detail to better understand how multiple stars form."
