Birth of a New star in McNeil’s Nebula

Some unusual violent behaviour of a young sun like star spinning at high speed and spewing out super hot plasma has observed with the combination of the X ray vision of three space telescope including the ESA's XMM Newton.

Data garnered from NASA's Chandra and Japan's Suzaku , the findings focus on a fundamental issue in astronomy i.e the birth of stars like our own Sun. These stars are generally composed of dust and gas. They collapse under gravity and develop a dense prostar at their center that is surrounded by orbiting disc of gas and dust. The protostar then emerges as material in the disc works its way towards the center and falls onto the newborn star at a speed of 100km/sec. However, rather than falling onto the protostar, a small fraction of the material is expelled in the form of high-speed jets originating from the north and south poles of the star. These jets can be highly variable, pointing to energetic activity in the innermost regions. But the visions is blocked by the thick gas and dust that hovers around the central sky .

But these X ray penetrate into this thick blanket and by monitoring variations in the intensity of X-ray emission for the young Sun-like star V1647 Ori, astronomers have been able to plot a picture of what it is beyond the dusty layer.

It is said that the star resides 1300 light-years away in McNeil's Nebula and was observed with XMM-Newton, Chandra, and Suzaku during two multi-year outbursts. The first lasted from 2003 to 2006; the second has been under way since 2008.

Kenji Hamaguchi, lead author of the paper said, "We think that magnetic activity on or around the stellar surface creates the super-hot plasma. This behaviour could be sustained by the continual twisting, breaking, and reconnection of magnetic fields, which connect the star and the disc, but which rotate at different speeds. Magnetic activity on the stellar surface could also be caused by accretion of material onto it."

The researchers say that for a star V1647 Ori's size, it signifies that it is spinning as fast as it can without ripping itself to pieces.

Norbert Schartel, ESA's Project Scientist for XMM-Newton said, "These observations of V1647 Ori by this trio of X-ray satellites provide new insight into what might be happening inside the dusty discs of newly-forming stars."