New Study Casts Doubt on Currently Accepted Theories of Star Formation

An international team of astronomers has found that long-held assumptions about the relationship between the mass of star-forming clouds of dust and gas and the eventual mass of the star itself may not be as straightforward as scientists think. Their work is published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

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Tau.Neutrino said:

New Study Casts Doubt on Currently Accepted Theories of Star Formation

An international team of astronomers has found that long-held assumptions about the relationship between the mass of star-forming clouds of dust and gas and the eventual mass of the star itself may not be as straightforward as scientists think. Their work is published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

more…

> Observations from within our Milky Way Galaxy have shown that there is a link between the mass of the star-forming cores and the mass of the stars that they eventually spawn

That I knew

> and that there is a distribution pattern that is common throughout.

That I didn’t know.

“In the new study, the research team led by the Université Paris Diderot, the Université Grenoble Alpes and the Universidad de Chile used the Atacama Large Millimetre/Submillimetre Array (ALMA) to gain an unprecedented insight into W43-MM1 — part of Westerhout 43 (W43), a highly luminous galactic massive star-forming region located in the constellation Aquila, approximately 18,000 light-years away.

By using ALMA, the astronomers were able to observe star-forming cores with an extraordinary range, from those similar to the mass of our Sun to ones that were 100 times more massive.

To their surprise, the distribution of star-forming cores was completely different to what had previously been observed in nearby regions of the Milky Way.

In particular they observed an abundance of extremely big stars with huge masses, but less smaller stars that are more common within our Galaxy.”

What counts as “star-forming cores in nearby regions of the Milky Way”?

I’m trying to remember where I saw very massive stars in a Westerhout open cluster before.

The Westerhout catalog is an astronomical catalog compiled by the Dutch astronomer Gart Westerhout, which identifies sources of radio radiation . The first version of this catalog was published in 1958. Search radio sources was carried out with the telescope 25 meters of Dwingeloo having an angular resolution of 0.57 degrees , at a frequency of 1.39 GHz.

Summary
Description of the catalog Modify
The original catalog included 82 entries, but the last did not mention the source position and was unusable. The inputs are marked as W NN , NN being a number from 1 to 81. Only the right ascension position and the declination of the sources are given, without any further precision such as the angular size , the flux density or the spectral index . Some extended sources have been separated into several sub-sources, identified by an index to the right of the name (W 33 Met, for example).

The sources in this catalog are very diverse in nature, some of which are clearly identified, for example:

supernova remnants ( W 28 , W 41 , W 63 )
maser ( W 03 )
star formation area ( W 49 )

Also

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_massive_stars

Westerhout 43, also known as W43, is a region of star formation of our galaxy located in the constellation of Aquila at a distance of 6 kilo-parsecs (nearly 20,000 light-years) of the Sun, that is considered the region of the Milky Way that is most actively forming stars. Despite this, however, it is so heavily obscured by the interstellar dust that it is totally invisible in the optical and must be studied using other wavelengths that are not affected by it, such as the infrared or the radio waves.

For closer star forming regions see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star-forming_regions_in_the_Local_Group

Rho Oph is 131 parsecs
Taurus molecular cloud 140 parsecs
Orion nebula 415 parsecs
etc.

I can’t help wondering if the link between core size and star size is governed by angular momentum. The smaller the angular momentum the bigger the star. A different part of the Milky Way could have a different angular momentum.

mollwollfumble said:

Westerhout 43, also known as W43, is a region of star formation of our galaxy located in the constellation of Aquila at a distance of 6 kilo-parsecs (nearly 20,000 light-years) of the Sun, that is considered the region of the Milky Way that is most actively forming stars. Despite this, however, it is so heavily obscured by the interstellar dust that it is totally invisible in the optical and must be studied using other wavelengths that are not affected by it, such as the infrared or the radio waves.

For closer star forming regions see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star-forming_regions_in_the_Local_Group

Rho Oph is 131 parsecs
Taurus molecular cloud 140 parsecs
Orion nebula 415 parsecs
etc.

I can’t help wondering if the link between core size and star size is governed by angular momentum. The smaller the angular momentum the bigger the star. A different part of the Milky Way could have a different angular momentum.

it could.