Star formation

Star formation

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An ALMA image showing the centre of the Milky Way and the location of 11 protostars found remarkably close to its supermassive black hole (indicated by the star). The lines show the direction of the bipolar lobes created by high-velocity jets from the protostars. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Yusef-Zadeh et al.; B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

Stars form close to Milky Way's black hole

At the centre of the Milky Way lies a supermassive black hole. Astronomers have discovered 11 stars orbiting nearby, resisting the incredible forces that should be tearing the stars apart.
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Giant galaxies may grow in cool gas clouds

The study of a growing galaxy 10 billion lightyears away has sparked a new theory as to how the largest galaxies in the Universe form.
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Star formation occurs in 'short bursts'

ESO's ALMA telescope has uncovered the growth of a protostar occuring in short bursts, revealing the process of stellar formation in greater clarity than ever before.
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Astronomers discover young planetary system

For the first time, astronomers have managed to capture the early stages of a forming planetary system, with the discovery of a young parent star that is already hosting a planet.
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Black holes power elliptical star formation

Two studies into elliptical galaxies' star formation have revealed a self-regulating system powered by the jets of black holes.
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This is an artist’s impression of the quasar 3C 279. Astronomers connected the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), in Chile, to the Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii, USA, and the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT) in Arizona, USA for the first time, to make the sharpest observations ever, of the centre of a distant galaxy, the bright quasar 3C 279. Quasars are the very bright centres of distant galaxies that are powered by supermassive black holes. This quasar contains a black hole with a mass about one billion times that of the Sun, and is so far from Earth that its light has taken more than 5 billion years to reach us. The team were able to probe scales of less than a light-year across the quasar — a remarkable achievement for a target that is billions of light-years away.

Quasars control star formation

New simulations could explain oddly behaving gas
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Galaxies stripped bare

Raging torrents of molecular gas, detected coming from galaxies for the first time by ESA's Herschel space observatory, could be the culprit behind galaxies that have lost the ability to form new stars.
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