key stage in the birth of a very massive star tagged posts

Artist’s impression of the disc and outflow around the massive young star. Credit: A. Smith, Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge.

A young star, located almost 11,000 light years away could help us understand how the most massive stars in the Universe are formed. This young star, already >30 times the mass of our Sun, is still in the process of gathering material from its parent molecular cloud, and may be even more massive when it finally reaches adulthood. The researchers, led by a team at the University of Cambridge, have identified a key stage in the birth of a very massive star, and found that these stars form in a similar way to much smaller stars like our Sun – from a rotating disc of gas and dust.

In our galaxy, massive young stars – those with a mass at least 8X greater than the Sun ...