Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered an adolescent protostar that is undergoing a rapid-fire succession of growth spurts. Evidence for this fitful youth is seen in a pair of intermittent jets streaming away from the star’s poles.
Known as CARMA-7, the protostar is one of dozens of similar objects in the Serpens South star cluster, which is located approximately 1,400 light-years from Earth. This clutch of nascent stellar objects was first detected by and named for the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) telescope.
"This young protostar is undergoing periods of rapid growth separated by periods of relative calm,” said Adele Plunkett, previously a National Science Foundation (NSF) graduate research fellow at Yale University and now a fellow at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile. "This punctuated stellar formation provides important insights into the chaotic interplay within this tightly packed cluster of young stars.”
Read the full story at NRAO News
See also "Growing pains in a cluster of protostars" at Yale News