Death and Birth of Stars

Three teams of scientists have used the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array radio telescope to learn tantalizing new details about how Sun-like stars are formed.

A superfast jet of subatomic particles presumably powered by the gravitational energy of a black hole has collided with nearby material, been slowed dramatically and released much of its energy in the collision, radio astronomers report.

Astronomers using radio telescopes in New Mexico and California have discovered a giant, rotating disk of material around a young, massive star, indicating that very massive stars as well as those closer to the size of the Sun may be circled by disks from which planets are thought to form.

Astronomers have used the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array radio telescope to make the first-ever time-lapse movie showing details of gas motions around a star other than our Sun.

Astronomers have found evidence for the most powerful magnetic field ever seen in the universe. They found it by observing a long-sought, short-lived afterglow of subatomic particles ejected from a magnetar — a neutron star with a magnetic field billions of times stronger than any on Earth and 100 times stronger than any other previously known in the Universe.

Radio telescope studies of the fiery afterglow of a Gamma Ray Burst have provided astronomers with the best clues yet about the origins of these tremendous cosmic cataclysms since their discovery more than 30 years ago.