Chilean astronomer aids in discovering how giant stars form
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Guido Garay, a Chilean astronomer, joined an international research team that successfully reconstructed the three-dimensional orbit of two massive protostars in a binary system.
The team published their findings in the journal Nature, providing key evidence to understand how giant stars originate. Previously, the complex gravitational dynamics made understanding this process difficult for scientists. More than 90% of massive stars exist in binary or multiple systems, impacting their evolution and the composition of their galaxies.
However, the ways these systems form remained unclear. Garay, a professor at the Department of Astronomy at the University of Chile, explained that at least 90% of massive stars are in binary or multiple systems, but the formation processes were not well understood. To investigate this, the team, led by Yichen Zhang of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, focused on IRAS 07299−1651, a young protobinary located 5,500 light-years from Earth.
Over eight years, from 2016 to 2024, they tracked the movement of the two protostars, which are currently about 200 Astronomical Units apart, roughly 200 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Each protostar has its own disk of gas and dust, continuing to gather material and increase in mass. Analysis revealed that the protostars follow a highly eccentric orbit and their gas and dust disks are misaligned, suggesting they did not form simultaneously from the same cloud.
Instead, the data supports the “core-merger” theory, that the protostars formed separately and were later captured by each other’s gravity, creating the binary system.
