For the first time, astronomers have caught a multiple-star system in the beginning stages of its formation, and their direct observations of this process give strong support to one of several suggested pathways to producing such systems.
The scientists looked at a cloud of gas some 800 light-years from Earth, homing in on a core of gas that contains one young protostar and three dense condensations that they say will collapse into stars in the astronomically-short period of 40,000 years. Of the eventual four stars, the astronomers predict that three may become a stable triple-star system.
When the research team used the VLA to map radio emission from methane molecules, they discovered that filaments of gas in B5 are fragmenting, and the fragments are beginning to form into additional stars that will become a multiple-star system.
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