Shooting Planets
Don’t wish upon a shooting star; wish upon a shooting planet.
Star formation in the Galactic Center
The Center of our Galaxy is one of the most extreme dynamical environments we can observe in detail because individual stars can actually be resolved using adaptive optics. Over time, monitoring individual stellar orbits has firmly established the presence of a supermassive black hole of about 4 x 106 M☉ (check out this video too). Further examination of these fast-moving stars’ properties (via infrared spectroscopy) revealed a surprising detail — many of these stars are young!
Caught in the Line of Fire: The Giants vs The Jets
This paper considers the fate of red giants and clouds of dark gas that wander in front of the relativistic jets within AGN. Numerical simulations are performed under varying jet conditions for obstacles of homogeneous and inhomogeneous composition.
Understanding star formation is all about perspective
Title: Line profiles of cores within clusters: I. The anatomy of a filament Authors: Rowan J. Smith, Rahul Shetty, Amelia M. Stutz, Ralf S. Klessen First Author’s Institution: Centre for Astronomy at the University of Heidelberg, GermanyStars are a fundamental component of the universe, building blocks of larger structures like galaxies and galaxy clusters. The cycle of star formation, evolution, death and rebirth, recycling on cosmic scales, is interesting but difficult to observe at all stages. Within our lifetimes, we can’t observe one star as it progresses through a complete life-cycle, but we can observe a variety of stars at a variety of evolutionary stages in order to tell the whole story. However, it remains a challenge to observe stars in the earliest stages as they are forming. Stars form in dense environments obscured by cold dusty material. One tool for identifying star-forming cores (this is the terminology used when a cloud of molecular gas has collapsed and begins to form a star) is the observed blue infall asymmetry. Let me explain.When you (the observer) stare straight into a (spherical) core as it collapses, you will see some gas on the near side of the cloud moving away from you and some gas on the far side of the cloud moving towards you. Remember, you only see a 2-D picture, and using the doppler shifting of light, you will only measure the velocity component projected along the line of sight. Along any line of sight, there will be two elements of gas with similar line-of-sight velocity components. However, considering that the gas is dense enough and becomes opaque at...
Making Baby Discs Around Baby Stars: Circumventing the Magnetic Braking Catastrophe
In this article the authors simulate the collapse of a magnetized, turbulent molecular cloud core to see if rotationally supported discs can form around central protostars.
How to Slow Down a Star
Young massive stars have a variety of different rotation rates, but what sets these initial speeds? In this paper, the authors investigate whether magnetic fields could be the answer.