Astronomers witness a star being born
Astronomers have glimpsed what could be the youngest known star at the very moment it is being born. Not yet fully developed into a true star, the object is in the earliest stages of star formation and has just begun pulling in matter from a surrounding envelope of gas and dust.
Scientists found the object using the Submillimeter Array in Hawaii and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Known as L1448-IRS2E, it’s located in the Perseus star-forming region about 800 light-years away in our Milky Way Galaxy.
Stars form out of large, cold, dense regions of gas and dust called molecular clouds that exist throughout the galaxy. Astronomers think L1448-IRS2E is in between the prestellar phase, a particularly dense region of a molecular cloud first begins to clump together, and the protostar phase, when gravity has pulled enough material together to form a dense, hot core out of the surrounding envelope.
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