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Newfound Stars are Huge, Powerful and Frantic
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 06:14 am ET
22 July 2003
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For Tuesday A host of massive stars destined to live brief and frantic lives has been discovered deep inside a chaotic stellar maternity ward. Photos of the scene are as vivid as astronomers' descriptions of the stars. Some of the stars are up to 120 times larger than the Sun. Their discoverers called them extreme in every way. They are born rapidly, live short but wildly luminous lives and will die explosively, likely forming black holes. While our Sun will live to be about 10 billion years old, lifetimes of the newfound stars will be measured in millions of years. Stars this massive were common in the early universe, theorists say, but they are rare nowadays and so are typically far away and difficult to study. The newfound stars have been hidden to optical technology inside a giant cloud of gas called W49 about 37,000 light-years away, within our Milky Way Galaxy. "We uncovered four massive clusters in there, with stars as massive as 120 times the mass of our Sun -- real 'beasts' that bombard their surroundings with incredibly intense stellar winds and strong ultraviolet light," said Nicole Homeier of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). "This is not a nice place to live." Indeed, though some astronomers have speculated that our own Sun might have formed in a similar region of intense star formation before being booted to its present location.Some massive stars in small pockets of W49 were known based on radio emissions. About 30 had been found and more were suspected. But because they are all enshrouded in the gas cloud, less than one-millionth of the light emitted by each star makes its way to Earth. Homeier and her colleague, Joo Alves of the ESO, used an infrared camera on the 3.5-meter New Technology Telescope at the ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile to peer inside W49A, a specific region of the cloud. "W49A has long been known to radio astronomers as one of the most powerful star-forming region in the galaxy," Alves said. "What we have found is in fact quite amazing: this stellar maternity ward is much bigger than we first thought and it has not stopped forming stars yet. We now have evidence for more than 100 such stars in this region, way beyond the few dozen known until now." All of the 100 star are at least 15 times as massive as the Sun. The findings were presented this week at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Australia. They will be detailed in the Astrophysical Journal. More Deep Space NewsSpace Photo Galleries & WallpaperAstronotes
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