Stuart Clarke, Author at New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Science news and science articles from New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Sat, 20 Feb 1993 00:00:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0.2 242057827 Science: Youngest star /article/1828446-science-youngest-star/?utm_campaign=RSS|NSNS&utm_content=currents&utm_medium=RSS&utm_source=NSNS Sat, 20 Feb 1993 00:00:00 +0000 http://mg13718613.200 Astronomers have glimpsed a star which is probably less than 10 000
years old, making it the youngest ever seen. The object, strictly a ‘protostar’,
is still pulling in matter.

Philippe Andre of the Centre d’Etudes de Saclay, France, Derek Ward-Thompson
of the University of Cambridge and Mary Barsony of the Harvard-Smithsonian
Centre for Astrophysics found the protostar, called VLA 1623, in a region
of star formation known as &rgr; Ophiuchi A. It is deeply embedded within a
dusty envelope of infalling matter.

Andre and his colleagues found the record-breaking protostar when they
used the James Clark Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii to make an infrared map
of the region. The envelope surrounding VLA 1623 has a diameter 25 times
as big as our Solar System and it contains only 0.6 times the mass of the
Sun.

The infrared map of &rgr; Ophiuchi A also showed three other objects which
appear to be denser regions of the cloud on the verge of collapsing into
protostars.

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