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Astronomers may have captured the best view yet of matter colliding with the surface of a young star, discoveries that could shed light on what the sun looked like in its youth.
Newborn stars are surrounded by a disk of gas and dust from which planets, asteroids, comets and moons are born. The star’s magnetic field connects the star to this protoplanetary disk, “carrying material from the disk to the star,” lead study author Catherine Espaillat, an astrophysicist at the study, told Space.com. Boston University.
In the new study, Espaillat and his colleagues investigated where a star’s magnetic field deposits protoplanetary disk material on a star. “This imprint is called the ‘hot spot’ because the material is very hot when it hits the star’s surface,” she explained.
Related: How was the solar system formed?
Scientists focused on GM Aurigae, a star roughly the same mass as the sun located about 420 light years away in the constellation Auriga. GM Aurigae is only about 2 million years old – in comparison, the sun is about 4.6 billion years old.
Previous work has not provided a clear picture of the structure and dynamics of these hot spots. In the new study, researchers are analyzing GM Aurigae with multiple observatories – the Hubble, Swift, and TESS space telescopes, as well as the Small and Medium Aperture Research Telescope System in Chile, the Lowell Discovery Telescope in Arizona, and the Global Network of Las Cumbres observatory. of telescopes.
“This is the first time that such an in-depth and time-coordinated study has been carried out on a young star,” said Espaillat.
The scientists found that the visible light they detected from GM Aurigae peaked in brightness about a day after the ultraviolet light. They suggested that this happened because the source of visible and ultraviolet light moved in and out of sight as it rotated with the star.
Combined with computer models of matter growing on stars, these results suggest that the hotspot’s density varies from its center to its edge at the star’s surface, the researchers said. The hot spot areas with different densities have different temperatures and therefore emit different wavelengths of light.
“For the first time, we are mapping the structure of this hot spot using observations and confirming theoretical predictions,” Espaillat said. “This result tells us more about what our sun looked like when it was young. Now our sun has sunspots, dark areas where the surface temperature is cooler. When our sun was young, it also had sunspots. hot spots. “
Future research will analyze GM Aurigae and other stars to detect more details about these hot spots.
Scientists detailed their findings online Sept.1 in the journal Nature.
Originally posted on Space.com.
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