SOMETHING other than gravity is helping an embryonic star devour the gas around it, causing it to grow at a furious pace and emit X-rays well before it should.
The precocious star, which lies about 500 light years away in a group of 10 young stars, is a Class 0 protostar. A team led by Kenji Hamaguchi, an astronomer at NASA鈥檚 Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has detected X-ray emission from this object, the first to be seen from such a young protostar.
Studies using space-based X-ray telescopes suggest that the X-rays are being emitted as the surrounding gas slams into the protostar鈥檚 dense core at speeds greater than can be explained by the object鈥檚 gravity alone. 鈥淲e need some other mechanism to explain the acceleration of the gases,鈥� says Hamaguchi. His team thinks that magnetic fields winding through the gas between the stars in this group are getting twisted and strengthened as the protostar spins. From time to time these fields release vast amounts of energy, accelerating nearby particles and smashing them onto the protostar鈥檚 core.
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