Ever wondered how baby stars are born? What shapes them and gives them the power to survive?
With the help of a bold team of astronomers, we can finally watch the birth of a star and what it takes to be a star in the Universe. The astronomers succeeded in simulating the magnificent event, and it’s going to be by far the wildest and intriguing thing you’ll ever see.
Here is what you need to know.
Incredible Simulation Offers Glimpse of How Baby Stars are Born
Exploring the process of how stars are born has been a challenging task in astrophysics. For decades, astronomers came across a lot of data that only offered them a glimpse of what that process could be.
But that is no longer a challenge. Thanks to a simulation dubbed STARFORGE (Star Formation in Gaseous Environment), astronomers simulated a whole molecular cloud of forming stars for the first time.
STARFORGE insights
To develop STARFORGE, astronomers had to take many physical phenomena into account. They needed gravity, temperatures, gas dynamics, magnetic fields, and the mighty plasma jets and stellar winds that emit from baby stars. Next, they ran their new simulations on Frontera, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, for about 100 days.
What they achieved is genuinely intriguing, and you can see it below:
Stellar nursery
The incredible video shows an entire stellar nursery and the birth of stars within from beginning to end.
Asked about how the new simulation will change things around in astrophysics, Claude-Andre Faucher-Giguere, an astrophysicist of Northwestern University, said:
“This new simulation will help us directly address fundamental questions we could not definitively answer before.”
And that’s not all. According to astronomers, we can now explore more different physical processes at work in stellar nurseries. That would certainly help us figure out the Universe more and answer some long-standing crucial questions about it.