Astronomers captured vivid images of a birth of a star using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope, and scientists are theorizing 'Zombie Vortices' are the key to a new star's formation.
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) released the images from the scientists' study.
According to the ESO news release, the "sharpness and sensitivity" of the images captured using ALMA observations lead the team to discover an "unsuspected outflow component" tailing the newborn star.
"The detail in the Herbig-Haro 46/47 images is stunning. Perhaps more stunning is the fact that, for these types of observations, we really are still in the early days. In the future ALMA will provide even better images than this in a fraction of the time," Stuartt Corder (Joint ALMA Observatory, Chile), a co-author on the new paper, said in a news release.
Though the images are breathtaking, they lead to the real question scientists have: how are stars born?
A team led by computational physicist Philip Marcus of University of California, Berkeley published a study in journal Physical Review Letters. Their findings show how "variations in gas density lead to instability, which then generates the whirlpool-like vortices needed for stars to form," according to a news release:
The leading theory in astronomy relies on magnetic fields as the destabilizing force that slows down the disks. One problem in the theory has been that gas needs to be ionized, or charged with a free electron, in order to interact with a magnetic field. However, there are regions in a protoplanetary disk that are too cold for ionization to occur.
"Current models show that because the gas in the disk is too cool to interact with magnetic fields, the disk is very stable," said Marcus. "Many regions are so stable that astronomers call them dead zones -- so it has been unclear how disk matter destabilizes and collapses onto the star."
The researchers said current models also fail to account for changes in a protoplanetary disk's gas density based upon its height.
"This change in density creates the opening for violent instability," said study co-author Pedram Hassanzadeh, who did this work as a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering, in a news release.
Researchers created computer models using the information acquired about changes in density during star formation. According to the news release, 3-D vortices emerged, and new information about "Zombie Vortices" along with it.
"Because the vortices arise from these dead zones, and because new generations of giant vortices march across these dead zones, we affectionately refer to them as 'zombie vortices,'" said Marcus. "Zombie vortices destabilize the orbiting gas, which allows it to fall onto the protostar and complete its formation."
The research team suggest the "Zombie Vortices" is a crucial step in creating a new star.
