Theexistence of massive stars ? up to a whopping 120 times the mass of the sun ? haslong perplexed astronomers. The big question was how these stellar behemothsreached their enormous sizes without blowing off all the gas that feeds them.
A newcomputer simulation of starformation has found a surprisingly simple solution to how these stars mightget around this problem.
"Wedidn?t' set out to solve that question, so it was a nice side benefit of thestudy," said study leader Mark Krumholz of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
For massivestars, radiation pressure is the dominant outward-flowing force counteractinggravity's inward pull to prevent the further collapse of the star. Previousstudies had suggested that radiation pressure would blow away a star's gascloud before the star could grow much larger than 20 times the mass of the sun.
"Whenyou apply the radiation pressure from a massive star to the dusty interstellargas around it, which is much more opaque than the star's internal gas, itshould explode the gas cloud," Krumholz explained.
As thedusty gas collapsed, onto the star's growing core, instabilities developed thatresulted in channels where radiation blew out through the cloud intointerstellar space, while gas continued falling inward through other channels.
"Youcan see fingers of gas falling in and radiation leaking out between thosefingers of gas," Krumholz said. "This shows that you don't need anyexotic mechanisms; massive stars can form through accretion processes just likelow-mass stars."
"Ithink now we can consider the mystery of how massive stars are able to form tobe solved," Krumholz said.
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