Editor's Summary
1 September 2005
Reach for the stars
There are two competing theories to explain how high-mass stars form: either they arise from mergers of low-mass younger stellar objects or, like low-mass stars, they arise by accretion from a circumstellar disk. The latter theory gets a boost from new observations of disks of dust and molecular gas around two high-mass protostars. A 15-solar-mass protostar in the Cepheus A region, and the 7-solar-mass Becklin–Neugebauer object in the famous star-forming region in Orion appear well on the way to star formation by accretion.
News and Views: Astrophysics: How to make a massive star
Two competing theories have been applied to the formation of high-mass stars. Observations of two stellar systems now suggest that the accretion model has a weightier claim than its rival merger model.
Barbara A. Whitney
doi:10.1038/437037a
Letter: A disk of dust and molecular gas around a high-mass protostar
Nimesh A. Patel, Salvador Curiel, T. K. Sridharan, Qizhou Zhang, Todd R. Hunter, Paul T. P. Ho, José M. Torrelles, James M. Moran, José F. Gómez & Guillem Anglada
doi:10.1038/nature04011
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (215K)
Letter: A circumstellar disk associated with a massive protostellar object
Zhibo Jiang, Motohide Tamura, Misato Fukagawa, Jim Hough, Phil Lucas, Hiroshi Suto, Miki Ishii & Ji Yang
doi:10.1038/nature04012
