From tiny cosmic seeds giant stars grow, astronomers find

A telescope in Hawaii has captured the most detailed view yet of distant stellar nurseries, offering insights into how cosmic seeds can grow into massive stars. The nurseries are located in the Snake nebula, stretching across almost 100 light-years about 11,700 light-years from Earth, which was targeted by the Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA) telescope because it shows the potential to form many massive stars, researchers said. "To learn how stars form, we have to catch them in their earliest phases, while they're still deeply embedded in clouds of gas and dust, and the SMA is an excellent telescope to do so," said study lead author Ke Wang of the European Southern Observatory, who started the research as a pre-doctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. The researchers studied two specific spots within the Snake nebula, detecting a total of 23 cosmic "seeds" -- faintly glowing spots that will eventually produce one or a few stars. The seeds generally weigh between 5 and 25 times the mass of the Sun, the researchers said, and the clustering within the Snake nebula suggests massive stars aren't born alone but in groups. "High-mass stars form in villages," study co-author and Harvard-Smithsonian researcher Qizhou Zhang said. "It's a family affair." Eventually the Snake nebula will dissolve into a chain of several star clusters, the scientists said.