Ashley Strickland
By Ashley Strickland, CNN
4 minute read
Published 10:38 AM EST, Thu November 30, 2023
For the first time, astronomers have glimpsed a young star outside the Milky Way galaxy that’s ringed by a dense disk where planets may form.
The massive star, called HH 1177, and its rotating disk were spotted in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring dwarf galaxy that’s about 160,000 light-years away. The unprecedented find could help scientists gain a better understanding of star and planet formation.
A newborn star grows in size by pulling in matter from its surroundings. The gas and dust accumulate in a flat disk around the star, known as an accretion disk, as a result of strong gravitational forces. The spinning disk transports the matter onto the star, which gets increasingly larger. The greater the star’s mass, the more powerful its gravitational field becomes, thereby pulling more gas and dust into the disk.
A colossal star such as HH 1177 lives fast and die young, forming more quickly and only having a life span that’s a fraction of that of a star like our sun. This shortened timeline makes the early stages of a massive star hard to observe in our galaxy, as both the star and its disk is hidden from view by the dusty material from which it forms.
More:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/30/world/first-extragalactic-disk-scn/index.html
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