2023-07-31 17:04:03
By combining observations from two giant telescopes, researchers have identified a highly unusual structure around a very young star.
In 2014, a rather unremarkable star in the constellation of the Unicorn, V960 Mon, experienced a sudden burst, multiplying its brightness by a factor of 20. Astronomers suspect that something unusual is happening there. As part of a program to observe this type of young stars with bursts of brightness, they point to the star, in 2016, two large telescopes located in Chile, the Alma antenna array and the Very Large Telescope (VLT).
The first results, rendered by Alma and visible in blue on the image presented here, seem disappointing: they show an apparently disordered distribution of dust around the star. « It was difficult to suspect, with this first image, that this object might be interesting », recognizes Philipp Weber, astronomer at the University of Santiago de Chile and first author of the publication which describes the observation, in the review The Astrophysical Journal Letters . In the absence of pressing interest, the analysis of the observation…
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