For the astronomers out there

Astronomers Determine Trigger of Massive Star Formation

Bjorn Carey
SPACE.com Staff Writer
SPACE.com 2 hours, 58 minutes ago

Some regions in space are especially good at creating massive stars. Astronomers know the recipe for creating a star in one of these stellar nurseries calls for hydrogen gas, dust, and some amount of heat and gravity, but they still don't know quite how all the parts come together or what triggers the event.

So several theories have been proposed. One predicts that low-mass stars accrete surrounding material. Another calls for the forceful combination of two protostars. A third, called the "collect-and-collapse" model, says that a parent massive star influences the formation of second-generation stars.

Now, a collection of images presented by astronomers at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille, France provides the most complete and detailed evidence supporting the collect-and-collapse model, without ruling out the other models.

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