Astronomers have imaged more than 300 newborn stars, revealing new clues about the early stages of star formation and the birth of planets.
Astronomers spot hundreds of baby stars and planet-forming disks : Read more
The article stated ""This survey revealed the average mass and size of these very young protoplanetary disks," John Tobin, who led the survey team from the NRAO,
said in the statement. "We can now compare them to older disks that have been studied intensively with ALMA as well."
What is the average mass and size here? The *baby stars* forming are in the Orion Molecular Cloud, a favorite for winter stargazers, e.g. M42. My telescopes show 6 stars in the Trapezium under higher power and the gas is moving away from these high mass stars as other studies show. Class O stars evaporate their surroundings quickly. The article said, "This means that younger disks have a lot more raw material from which
planets could form," Tobin said in the statement. "Possibly, bigger planets already start to form around very young stars." Four of the young stars captured in the survey stood out from the rest, as they appeared to be "irregular or blobby," the researchers said. The strange shapes suggest that the stars are still in the very early stages of forming, because they do not yet have the flattened, rotating disk surrounding them or the strong outflow of material that are both
characteristic of a protostar, the statement said. "We rarely find more than one such irregular object in one observation," Nicole Karnath, one of the survey team members from the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) Science Center, said in the statement. "We are not entirely sure how old they are, but they are probably younger than 10,000 years."
I did review this link provided in the report,
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab6f64
"148 protostars at a resolution of ~0".08 (32 au). ", so these stars are about 400 pc distance. "mean protostellar dust disk masses" in the abstract are some 25.9 earth masses, 14.9, and 11.6 earth masses. This is small compared to computer models for protoplanetary dust disk evolution that formed our solar system, commonly >=39,000 earth masses or more. In 1999, surveys of T Tauri stars suggested 330-350 earth masses for dust disks.
The abstract also said "We use the dust continuum emission at 0.87 and 9 mm to measure the dust disk radii and masses toward the Class 0, Class I, and flat-spectrum protostars, characterizing the evolution of these disk properties in the protostellar phase. .."
Class O stars are big, massive and blow away their surroundings. Interesting observations here.