Birth of new stars staged by Magnetic fields

Birth of new stars staged by Magnetic fields

A recent research journal that’s being published in ‘Nature’ suggests that Magnetic fields are another reason behind formation of new stars.

A massive collision of dust and interstellar gas instigates birth of stars and their planets. The colorful nebulae that we see in the eye dropping images are actually due to the brightness of the young stars.

The so-called molecular clouds are mainly made of hydrogen molecules which is something rare and unusual for cosmos as the conditions are hardly great for hydrogen atoms to bond into molecules.

Everyone who has seen a magnet act on iron filings in the classic classroom experiment knows that magnetic fields can be used to impose order. Some researchers have argued that something similar goes on in the case of molecular clouds: that galaxies’ magnetic
fields guide and direct the condensation of interstellar matter to form denser clouds and facilitate their further collapse.

Many astronomers see this as they reason behind star birth but others feel that the gravitational attraction of the cloud’s matter and turbulence of gas within these clouds cancel out the influence of an external magnetic field.

However, if turbulence had played such an important role in star birth, then the magnetic field around these clouds should have been more random and disordered.

Using a telescope known as the Submillimeter Array (SMA), which is located at Mauna Kea Observatory on Mauna Kea Island, Hawai’i, Li and Henning measured specific properties of radiation received from different regions of the galaxy which are correlated
with the orientation of these region’s magnetic fields. They found that the magnetic fields associated with the galaxy’s six most massive giant molecular clouds were orderly, and well aligned with the galaxy’s spiral arms.

Magnetic fields certainly play a huge role when it comes to the formation of these molecularly dense clouds which sets the stage for the birth of stars. Other planetary systems like our own could also have gone through these processes after the big bang.

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Posted by Taimoor Tariq on Nov 17 2011. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry