NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope was officially decommissioned in 2020, but data collected by the retired observatory has revealed that infant stars grow at a rather quick pace with more frequent feeding frenzies than previously thought. Star formation happens when turbulence within clouds of dust and gas form knot-like structures. When these knots gain sufficient mass, their gravitational pull causes the infall of surrounding gas, leading to a stage known as protostar.
The central core eventually starts heating up and gets denser over time, kicking off the nuclear fusion process at its heart that feeds on gas to keep the mature star going for hundreds of millions of years. But let’s stick to the early days of star formation, for now. Once the clouds of gas and dust form a dense core while a dusty disk surrounds it, this stage is called a “Class 0” protostar. It is the earliest development stage for a star and usually lasts for around a hundred thousand years for a star like the Sun.
These infant stars occasionally have an outburst, which happens due to a sudden binge of accumulating gas and dust. These outbursts have been observed only on rare occasions, but thanks to observation data collected by Spitzer, NASA scientists spotted three such protostar outbursts in the Orion constellation between 2004 and 2017. Two of these outbursts in “Class 0” protostars had never been observed before, but what really took the team by surprise was their frequency.
Baby Stars Binge Frequently To Bulk Up
In a paper published in the the lifetime of a star. Titled “The Rate, Amplitude, and Duration of Outbursts from Class 0 protostars in Orion,” the paper also mentions over half of a star’s mass is gained during the Class 0 protostar stage, with a healthy chunk of it happening during outbursts.
In fact, the paper also hypothesizes that outbursts in Class 0 protostars could be more frequent than their evolved siblings. Moreover, outbursts could very well be the dominant method of material accretion for stars in their cosmic diapers. As for why outbursts take place, the paper postulates that they happen when the rate of material falling on the protostar from the surrounding envelope of gas and dust exceeds the rate of accretion from the disk. Another interesting aspect of the latest finding is that the Spitzer was not the only “retired” exploration system that lent a hand with the discovery. The team also sourced data collected by ESA’s Herschel Space Telescope (shut down in 2013) and the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), which was closed earlier this year.