ALMA Reveals Baby Star Surrounded by a Hot Core

Astronomers have now discovered a hot-cocoon around a baby star. The newly-found hot cloud is estimated to be at least ten times bigger than hot clouds around other new stars.

The team led by University of Electro-Communication was observing the infrared dark cloud G34.43+00.24 MM3 using the ALMA Observatory when it found the baby-star with a massive hot molecular cloud

Baby stars are cocooned in hot clouds, which are warmed up from the inside. Note that astronomers call these clouds hot cores as they are "hot" enough by cosmic standards. These clouds that wrap around the new star are also called "Hot Cores" and have temperatures exceeding -160 degrees Celsius. The star that the team observed has a mass that's similar to the mass of our sun.

However, this star is emitting much more energy than any other solar-mass star.

The infancy of a star is a mystery to astronomers . These baby stars are formed inside dark clouds of matter that don't let any optical light pass through. Also, these stars complete their infancy pretty soon, taking just few hundred thousand years. But, once a star is formed, it can burn for billions of years. For example, our sun has been burning for about 4.6 billion years and is expected to last another 1.1 billion years.

Stars are formed in very cold, dust clouds with temperatures of about -260 degrees Celsius. Infrared Dark Clouds (IRDC) are dense regions of these clouds and sites of a star formation. Most stars are born in clusters so researchers often find it difficult to understand its formation.

The latest study shows that even solar-mass stars can have "a large diversity in the star formation process."

"Thanks to the high sensitivity and spatial resolution, we need only a few hours to discover a previously unknown baby star. This is an important step to understand the star formation process in a cluster forming region," Takeshi Sakai at the University of Electro-Communication, Japan, lead author of the study said in a news release.

The study, "ALMA Observations of the IRDC Clump G34.43+00.24 MM3: Hot Core and Molecular Outflows," is published in the Astrophysical Journal.