Scientists have discovered what reports have dubbed a "Baby Monster" star in outer space.
Astronomers used the most powerful radio telescope in the world, the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array) telescope in Chile, according to the University of Manchester (UMAN). The "stellar womb" is 500 times the mass of the Sun and much brighter.
"The remarkable observations from ALMA allowed us to get the first really in-depth look at what was going on within this cloud," lead author Dr Nicolas Peretto, from Cardiff University, said in a news release. "We wanted to see how monster stars form and grow, and we certainly achieved our aim. One of the sources we have found is an absolute giant - the largest protostellar core ever spotted in the Milky Way!"
The research team published their findings in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. The study revealed matter being drawn into the center of the huge gaseous cloud, according to UMAN.
"Even though we already believed that the region was a good candidate for being a massive star-forming cloud, we were not expecting to find such a massive embryonic star at its centre," Peretto said. "This cloud is expected to form at least one star 100 times more massive than the Sun and up to a million times brighter. Only about one in 10,000 of all the stars in the Milky Way reach that kind of mass."
Astronomers have different theories of how the huge, gaseous stars have formed, but this particular study says the cloud core began to collapse inwards, sub-sequentially causing materials to be pulled to the center.
"Our observations reveal in superb detail the filamentary network of dust and gas flowing into the central compact region of the cloud and strongly support the theory of global collapse for the formation of massive stars," Perreto said.
Perreto added ALMA has helped revolutionize astronomers' research, and is helping solve current problems while raising new questions.
To read more about the star findings, click here.
