Magnetic storms in the gas that surrounds young stars could help solve a years-old mystery.
Researchers have been puzzling over why developing stars give off an unexpected amount of infrared light, a NASA news release reported.
New research suggests gas and dust above the stars' planet-forming disks could absorb starlight, causing the infrared glow.
"If you could somehow stand on one of these planet-forming disks and look at the star in the center through the disk atmosphere, you would see what looks like a sunset," Neal Turner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif, said in the news release.
The new theory also helps better-explain how these disks are stirred up and molded into future planets, asteroids, and other objects.
Stars are birthed from "collapsing pockets in enormous clouds of gas and dust, rotating as they shrink down under the pull of gravity," the news release reported. As the star grows more material falls onto it from the cloud, the rotation eventually flattens these materials into a disk.
In the 1980s researchers observed more infrared light coming from these objects than they predicted. The team found the infrared light could not solely be emitted from the turbulent disk.
One theory suggested the stars were surrounded by "dusty halos" which interfered with their visible light and reemitted it in infrared form.
Recent observations made using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope three-dimensional computer modeling showed the discs needed to have "fuzzy surfaces, with layers of low-density gas supported by magnetic fields, similar to the way solar prominences are supported by the sun's magnetic field," the news release reported.
The news research calculated how the starlight reacted with the disk and its "fuzzy" atmosphere; they found the atmosphere absorbs the starlight and re-radiates it, which accounts for the excess infrared light.
"The starlight-intercepting material lies not in a halo, and not in a traditional disk either, but in a disk atmosphere supported by magnetic fields," Turner said. "Such magnetized atmospheres were predicted to form as the disk drives gas inward to crash onto the growing star."
