NASA has released an image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope of the nebula cataloged as G035.20-0.74, a star nursery in the constellation Aquila. In this specific case, the stars that are born are really massive, B-Type blue giants that are up to five times hotter than the Sun. Their formation is among the astronomers’ research objects and within G035.20- 0.74 there’s a massive protostar that is emitting jets of gas. It’s a phenomenon known in protostars but it’s difficult to observe in the ones so massive, which tend to be surrounded by larger quantities of dust that hide them.
B-Type stars have a mass between 2 and 16 times the Sun’s with a surface temperature between 10,000 and 30,000 Kelvin. Only O-Type stars are more massive and are very rare, also because they consume their hydrogen at very high speeds and consequently have a life that is very short in astronomical terms.
When stars are still forming, they absorb gas from the cloud in which they are born but some of that gas is ejected in jets. It’s a process that has a short duration, again in astronomical terms, estimated at about 100,000 years. At the end of that process, the protostar reaches equilibrium and enters the main sequence, where it spends most of its normal life.
The jets emitted by protostars have been observed mainly in relatively small mass ones, close to the Sun’s or lower. Massive stars form in clouds where there are large amounts of gas that can be absorbed but this makes their observations difficult. Observations of the G035.20-0.74 nebula conducted with the Hubble Space Telescope made it possible to detect infrared emissions that pass through the dust. The combination with observations conducted by radio telescopes offered a more complete picture of the massive protostar within it.
The result of the study of the protostar in the G035.20-0.74 nebula indicates that its jets have properties similar to those of jets associated with lower-mass stars. That means that the mechanisms of star formation are similar in stars of mass at least up to 10 times the Sun’s. It’s a result obtained thanks to one of the images obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope, at the same time spectacular and very useful to science.
