Massively Bright Star Born in Milky Way Galaxy from Dark Cloud Core

Stars are born and die each day in our Universe, either burning brightly as they collect clouds of dust and gas or slowly fading after becoming a brilliant supernova. Now, scientists have witnessed the very beginnings of a massive star within our own Milky Way. They've watched in unprecedented detail as a star 10,000 light years from Earth came into being within a dark cloud core.

There are several different theories when it comes to how stars form. Yet the latest findings seem to point to the fact that an entire, massive cloud core begins to collapse inwards. Material rains in toward the center, eventually forming a star.

Actually observing this particular star's birth is huge when it comes to understanding how stars form. The researchers employed the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile. This powerful instrument allowed them to examine the stellar womb where this star is forming. At 500 times the mass of the sun and many times more luminous, the new star is the largest ever to be seen in our galaxy.

"Even though we already believed that the region was a good candidate for being a massive star-forming cloud, we were not expecting to find such a massive embryonic star at its center," said Nicolas Peretto from Cardiff University in a news release. "This cloud is expected to form at least one star 100 times more massive than the sun and up to a million times brighter. Only about one in 10,000 of all stars in the Milky Way reach that kind of mass."

The new observations reveal extreme detail in the filamentary network of dust and gas flowing into the central compact region of the cloud. It strongly supports the theory of global collapse for the formation of massive stars and reveals a little bit more about how these bodies are created.

"Not only are these stars rare, but their births are extremely rapid and childhood short, so finding such a massive object so early in its evolution in our galaxy is a spectacular result," said Gary Fuller, one of the co-authors, in a news release.

The findings are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.