An international team of astronomers–including a researcher from the Georgia Institute of Technology–has taken groundbreaking steps to explain how these very massive stars formed. They accomplished this by observing the Hub-filament system (HFS) molecular cloud. This study forms part of the prospective INFANT survey. With this, they used high-resolution observational data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study the disk around HFS I18308.
The Hub-filament system consists of two main filamentary structures, F1 and F2. At its heart is a central hub centralization. This unusual configuration opens up new opportunities for astronomers to probe the dynamics at work in star formation processes with unprecedented detail. Our observations, specifically the core spacing distribution in the HFS, underscore the chaotic nature of massive star formation. These new discoveries shed light on how stars are born in these strange settings.
The findings, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, revealed some enthralling information about the Hub-filament system. This finding demonstrates that this system is undergoing bimodal fragmentation and multiscale dynamical mass accretion. Meeting two, this observation shows that there are two fragmentation modes operating inside the HFS. The researchers noted that despite these complex processes, they found no high-mass prestellar cores exceeding 30 solar masses within the cloud.
The team utilized the full power of ALMA for this study, resulting in their most detailed view yet. This allowed them to probe deep sub-millimeter details of the shape and dynamics of the HFS. As described below, this high-resolution data provides insights into two key phenomena: dual fragmentation modes and multi-scale dynamic material accretion. The role of these factors is quite pivotal to the conception of stars.
As the astronomers delved further into their study of the Hub-filament system (HFS) I18308. What they found were some truly bizarre features that may radically alter the way we think about stellar formation theories. The DOI for the published study is 10.1051/0004-6361/202554634, retrieved from phys.org on August 8, 2023.
