Astronomers detect explosive star birth about 1,500 light-years away

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New Delhi: Astronomers have discovered explosive star birth which they claim is about 1,500 light-years away from planet Earth.

Around 500 years ago, a pair of adolescent protostars had a perilously close encounter that blasted their stellar nursery apart.

Using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile, astronomers have examined the widely scattered debris from this explosive event.

Shortly after starting to form some 100,000 years ago, several protostars in the Orion Molecular Cloud 1 (OMC-1), a dense and active star factory about 1,500 light-years from Earth just behind the Orion Nebula, latched onto each other gravitationally and gradually drew closer.

Eventually, two of these stars either grazed each other or collided, triggering a powerful eruption that launched other nearby protostars and hundreds of giant streamers of dust and gas into interstellar space at speeds greater than 150 kilometres per second.

This cataclysmic interaction released as much energy as our Sun emits over the course of 10 million years.

Today, the remains of this spectacular explosion are visible from Earth.

"What we see in this once calm stellar nursery is a cosmic version of a 4th of July fireworks display, with giant streamers rocketing off in all directions," said John Bally from University of Colorado in the US.

Groups of stars such as those in OMC-1 are born when a cloud of gas hundreds of times more massive than our Sun begins to collapse under its own gravity. In the densest regions, protostars form and begin to drift about randomly.

Over time, this random motion can dampen, which allows some of the stars to fall toward a common centre of gravity, usually dominated by a particularly large protostar.

If these stars draw too close to each other before they drift away into the galaxy, violent interactions can occur.

According to the researchers, such explosions are expected to be relatively short lived, with the remnants like those seen by ALMA lasting only centuries.

(With PTI inputs)