Gizmorama - December 30, 2015

Good Morning,

Today's issue has us looking towards the stars. Two great articles await you. One concerns star formation and the other details the skeleton of the Milky Way. Far out!

Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Tangled magnetic fields help explain star formation --*
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. - A new study suggests the stellar material swirling around a very young protostar is pulling in magnetic fields from its surroundings. By analyzing these twisting magnetic fields, researchers may be able to gain new insight into the formation of young stars.

The latest discovery -- detailed in the Astrophysical Journal -- was made possible by the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array radio telescope, often called VLA for short. The VLA allowed researchers with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory to analyze the alignment of radio waves emitted by gas and dust being pulled into the swirling stellar disk.

The waves' alignment, or polarization, show the formation and movement of magnetic fields in the region surrounding the young star.

"The alignment of magnetic fields in this region near young stars is very important to the development of the disks that orbit them," study author Leslie Looney, an astronomer at the University of Illinois, said in a press release. "Depending on its alignment, the magnetic field can either hinder the growth of the disk or help funnel material onto the disk, allowing it to grow."

The star of note is NGC1333 IRAS 4A. It's found 750 light-years away in the constellation Perseus, and is estimated to be just 10,000 years old. Its mass is believed to be roughly twice that of our own sun.

One of two stars forming within a cloud of stellar material, the newly born star has effectively become a guinea pig for the analysis of tangling magnetic fields.

For the first time, astronomers have revealed the region surrounding a protostar where the structure of magnetic fields begins to look different from those farther away -- where fields pulled into from afar twist and interact with those closer to the newborn star.

"Our VLA observations are showing us this region, where the change in shape of the magnetic field is taking place," said co-author Erin Cox, also with the University of Illinois.

The new data also shows that millimeter- to centimeter-sized particles are abundant in the stellar disk -- bigger than astronomers expected, suggesting particles accumulate rather quickly in the disk of young star.


*-- New study details skeleton of the Milky Way galaxy --*
BOSTON - Researchers with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics claim to have traced the "skeletal structure" of the Milky Way galaxy. They shared their findings earlier this month in the Astrophysical Journal.

Astronomers Catherine Zucker, Cara Battersby and Alyssa Goodman argue that the Milky Way's spiral arms are organized around distinct skeletal features. They describe these features, or bones, as long, thin, high-contrast filaments of cold, dark clouds of gas and dust. The filaments can stretch thousands of light-years in length, but boast a girth of only a few light-years.

Documenting these skeletal features may be key to understanding our home galaxy's broader structure.

Despite decades of studies and observations, researchers still aren't in agreement on whether the Milky Way has two or four spiral arms. The exact location and design of these arm aren't entirely clear either. Astronomers also aren't sure whether inter-arm structure are mostly web-like or feature distinctive spurs of stars and gas.

A map of the galaxy's bones may answer some of these questions, researchers say.

The first skeletal structure was spotted by astronomers during a mid-infrared survey of Milky Way's arms conducted five years.

The astronomers' latest infrared survey presents evidence of 10 new potential skeletal features, all positioned near the galaxy's mid-plane. Each of the ten have an aspect ratio -- or length-to-width ratio -- of at least 50-to-1. All weigh at least several thousand solar masses.

Researchers expect future surveys to reveal hundreds of similar bones.

"Ultimately, if we can reliably identify hundreds of Milky Way bones," researchers wrote, "it should be possible to combine the 'skeleton' suggested by bones with other tracers of galactic structure, in order to piece together a much better view of the Milky Way's structure than we have now."

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