The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter array telescope in Chile captured images of the birth of a "monster star" in Earth's Milky Way.
The telescope was able to capture baby images of the star forming inside a vast cloud of interstellar dust that has 500 times the mass of the sun.
"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," said Nicolas Peretto of CEA/AIM Paris-Saclay in a press release. "This object is expected to form a star that is up to 100 times more massive than the Sun. Only about one in ten thousand of all the stars in the Milky Way reach that kind of mass!"
Scientists are yet to obtain a clear picture as to how stars are formed and this new observation can help them better understand the star formation process. Currently, scientists believe stars are formed when large clouds of gas collapse inward, with the material at the center becoming stars. Another popular theory of star formation is that large clouds first break up into smaller clouds that each give rise to smaller cores that form stars.
"The remarkable observations from ALMA allowed us to get the first really in-depth look at what was going on within this cloud," says Peretto. "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 newly forming star has been named Spitzer Dark Cloud (SDC) 335.579-0.292. Scientists expect the star to develop 100 times the sun's mass, which will be quite a rare formation as only one in ten thousand stars in the Milky Way grow to such large sizes.
"Not only are these stars rare, but their birth is extremely rapid and their childhood is short, so finding such a massive object so early in its evolution is a spectacular result," team member Gary Fuller of the University of Manchester in the U.K. said in a statement.
