Regions in the Dragon Cloud are collapsing to form very massive stars, revealing how this process happens all along
One more clue to validate the training models of the giant stars was obtained from a study of the Dragon Cloud, a star-forming region of gas and dust. According to the research, individual clouds collapse directly into a single star, contradicting theoretical models proposing other mechanisms.
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Massive stars are relatively difficult to find because they are not very numerous in the Milky Way. In addition to being short-lived and exploding supernova very early, it is not easy to find stars of this type in the early stages of formation. Therefore, understanding how they are born is a bit challenging.
Observations of the Dragon Cloud, rich in molecular hydrogen and star-forming dust, could help change that. Using the ALMA telescope, located in Chile’s Atacama Desert, a team of astronomers scoured the region to study the dust.
Several regions of active star formation were found, but a dense and strange cluster caught the attention of researchers because there were no newborn stars there. Looking further, they found that it was made up of two separate regions.
Although there was no star formation aoli, the astronomers noticed that these small regions were collapsing to form stars soon. One of the clouds has more than 30 solar masses of material and the other just two solar masses.
If each of them gives rise to a star, it will be evident that massive stars are born from the direct collapse of a single cloud, contrary to the models that propose the division of clouds into smaller clusters. This does not appear to be the case for the two Dragon Cloud regions, as they show no signs of fragmentation.
Thus, the directed collapse proposal, called the core accretion model, gains important observational support. The implication of this is that, if the new study is correct, massive stars have already been born with massive masses, dozens of times greater than that of the Sun.
To confirm the findings, the team plans to look further into the region, and other researchers may do the same to add more data to the debate. The study was accepted for publication in Astronomy and astrophysics and it was revealed in the repository arXiv.
Source: arXiv.orgthrough: Universe Today
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