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Astronomy

A truly embryonic star

Nature volume 492, pages 52–53 (2012)Cite this article

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The discovery of what may be the best example yet of a forming star caught in the moments just before birth provides a missing link in our understanding of how giant gas clouds collapse to form fully fledged stars. See Letter p.83

In the known Universe there are some 1022 stars, give or take a factor of ten. Within our own Milky Way, around 20% of the mass can be accounted for by about 2 × 1011 luminous stars, and another 20% or more may be locked up in 'failed' stars — brown dwarfs, which are too small to ignite thermonuclear fusion — and in stellar remnants such as black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs1. That nature has found a way to routinely bring together far-flung wisps of matter, condense it by 24 orders of magnitude, and form the nuclear engines responsible for illuminating the Universe is at the same time astonishing and undeniable. Precisely what that mechanism is, however, is only now being understood by astronomers, and the paper by Tobin et al.2 on page 83 of this issue brings to bear a central and previously missing piece: the first detection and measurement of a truly embryonic star.

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Figure 1: The Orion nebula.

CAMBRIDGE ASTRON . SURV. UNIT/J. EMERSON/VISTA/ESO

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Astronomy and Physics, David A. Clarke is at the Institute for Computational Astrophysics, Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 3C3, Canada.,

    David A. Clarke

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  1. David A. Clarke
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Correspondence to David A. Clarke.

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Clarke, D. A truly embryonic star. Nature 492, 52–53 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/492052a

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