These Stellar Explosions Cause Massive Stars to be Born!

Astronomers have mapped only the second molecular outflow of its kind.

Transcript

00:00This is what's called a molecular outflow. It can occur in nebulas dense with hydrogen where stars

00:08form sending gas and other material flying out into massive cosmic clouds and it's incredibly

00:13rare for them to ever be mapped. In fact the first clearly documented one ever was found in 1980 in

00:18the Orion Nebula and the second was only recently caught by the Atacama Large Millimeter Submillimeter

00:23Array or ALMA. This is W28A2. It's what's known as a massive stellar nursery where new massive

00:29stars form. Astronomers believed this would be a likely area to catch one of these molecular

00:34outflows as smaller stellar explosions are always bipolar shooting off in only two directions whereas

00:39the previous molecular outflow seen in Orion exploded in many directions. And sure enough when they

00:44pointed ALMA that way they found an ultra dense hydrogen cloud with a massive molecular outflow

00:49with 34 of these streamers coming directly from a single point within the cloud. What's more they

00:54calculated the speed of the outflow to be traveling 80 miles per second and the explosion started about

00:59a thousand years ago. These outflows are much weaker than when a star goes supernova and we don't

01:03really know why they happen but they could be key in star formation and just like the Orion

01:07molecular outflow there was yet again no star at the center of this stellar explosion.