Scientists have observed in unprecedented detail the birth a monster star within a dark cloud - the largest stellar womb seen in Milky Way, about 10,000 light years from Earth.
The team used the new Atacama Large
Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile - the most powerful radio telescope in the world - to view the stellar womb which, at 500 times the mass of the Sun and many times more luminous, is the largest ever seen in our galaxy.
The researchers said their observations reveal how matter is being dragged into the centre of the huge gaseous cloud by the gravitational pull of the forming star - or stars - along a number of dense threads or filaments.
"The remarkable observations from ALMA allowed us to get the first really in-depth look at what was going on within this cloud," said lead author Dr Nicolas Peretto, from Cardiff University.
"We wanted to see how monster stars form and grow, and we certainly achieved our aim. One of the sources we have found is an absolute giant - the largest protostellar core ever spotted in the Milky Way!" he said.
"Even though we already believed that the region was a good candidate for being a massive star-forming cloud, we were not expecting to find such a massive embryonic star at its centre.
"This cloud is expected to form at least one star 100 times more massive than the Sun and up to a million times brighter. Only about one in 10,000 of all the stars in the Milky Way reach that kind of mass," he added.
Different theories exist as to how these massive stars form but the team's findings lend weight to the idea that the entire cloud core begins to collapse inwards, with material raining in towards the centre to form one or more massive stars.
"Not only are these stars rare, but their births are extremely rapid and childhood short, so finding such a massive object so early in its evolution in our Galaxy is a spectacular result, said co-author Professor Gary Fuller, from The University of Manchester, said.
"Our observations reveal in superb detail the filamentary network of dust and gas flowing into the central compact region of the cloud and strongly support the theory of global collapse for the formation of massive stars," Fuller said.
The study was published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
