Astronomers see mysterious nitrogen area in a butterfly-shaped star formation disk – Phys.Org

Posted: June 15, 2017 at 9:45 pm

June 15, 2017 An international team of astronomers, led by Dutch scientists, has discovered a region in our Milky Way that contains many nitrogen compounds in the southeast of a butterfly-shaped star formation disk and very little in the north-west. This artistic impression shows the universe around the star formation area with, as an overlay, the scientists' observations. Credit: Veronica Allen/Alexandra Elconin

An international team of astronomers, led by Dutch scientists, has discovered a region in our Milky Way that contains many nitrogen compounds in the southeast of a butterfly-shaped star formation disk and very little in the north-west. The astronomers suspect that multiple stars-to-be share the same star formation disk, but the precise process is still a puzzle. The article with their findings has been accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

An international team of astronomers studied the star forming region G35.20-0.74N, more than 7000 light years from Earth in the southern sky. The astronomers used the (sub)millimeter telescope ALMA that is based on the Chilean Chajnantor plateau. ALMA can map molecular gas clouds in which stars form.

The researchers saw something special in the disk around a young, heavy star. While large amounts of oxygen-containing and sulfur-containing hydrocarbons were present throughout the disk, the astronomers found only nitrogen-containing molecules in the southeastern part of the disk. In addition, it was 150 degrees warmer on the nitrogen side than on the other side of the disk.

Based on these observations, the scientists suspect that there are multiple stars forming at the same time in one disk and that some stars are hotter or heavier than others. The researchers expect the disk to eventually break into several smaller disks as the stars grow.

A few years ago, there have been observed chemical differences in a star forming region in Orion. First author Veronica Allen (University of Groningen and SRON): "The area in Orion is five times bigger than our area. We have probably been lucky because we expect that such a chemical difference to be short-lived."

Second author Floris van der Tak (University of Groningen and SRON): "Many of the nitrogen molecules are poisonous cyanides. We do not know much about them because it is dangerous to work with those molecules in laboratories on earth."

The astronomers are now investigating the star formation cloud in more detail. Allen: "Maybe we can see the disk break into smaller disks in real time." In addition, the astronomers make models to see how differences in age, mass, temperature or gas density can cause a difference in chemical composition, too.

Explore further: First radio detection of lonely planet disk shows similarities between stars and planet-like objects

More information: V. Allen et al. Chemical segregation in hot cores with disk candidates. An investigation with ALMA, Astronomy & Astrophysics (2017). DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201629118

First radio observations of the lonely, planet-like object OTS44 reveal a dusty protoplanetary disk that is very similar to disks around young stars. This is unexpected, given that models of star and planet formation predict ...

Stars form from gas and dust floating in interstellar space. But, astronomers do not yet fully understand how it is possible to form the massive stars seen in space. One key issue is gas rotation. The parent cloud rotates ...

For the first time, astronomers have been able to peer into the heart of planet formation, recording the temperature and amount of gas present in the regions most prolific for making planets.

Observations led by astronomers at the University of Leeds have shown for the first time that a massive star, 25 times the mass of the Sun, is forming in a similar way to low-mass stars.

For the first time, astronomers have seen a dusty disk of material around a young star fragmenting into a multiple-star system. Scientists had suspected such a process, caused by gravitational instability, was at work, but ...

(Phys.org)A team of researchers from the U.S. and Taiwan has captured the first clear image of a young star surrounded by an accretion disk. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the team describes ...

An international team of astronomers, led by Dutch scientists, has discovered a region in our Milky Way that contains many nitrogen compounds in the southeast of a butterfly-shaped star formation disk and very little in the ...

Astronomers have released an image of a vast filament of star-forming gas, 1200 light-years away, in the stellar nursery of the Orion Nebula.

China successfully launched on Thursday its first X-ray space telescope to study black holes, pulsars and gamma-ray bursts, state media reported.

For decades, scientists thought that the magnetic field lines coursing around newly forming stars were both powerful and unyielding, working like jail bars to corral star-forming material. More recently, astronomers have ...

A small international team of researchers has found that water waves created due to scattering from a spinning vortex can show rotational superradiancean effect astrophysicists have predicted likely to occur in black holes, ...

Researchers at the University of Texas San Antonio using observations from NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, found that the dust surrounding active, ravenous black holes is much more compact ...

Please sign in to add a comment. Registration is free, and takes less than a minute. Read more

See the article here:

Astronomers see mysterious nitrogen area in a butterfly-shaped star formation disk - Phys.Org

Related Posts