MUSE Spots Bizarre Stellar Object with Illuminated Protoplanetary Disk – Sci.News

Astronomers using the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESOs Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have imaged 177-341 W, a proplyd an externally illuminated protoplanetary disk around a young star located in the Orion Nebula Cluster.

This VLT/MUSE image shows the proplyd 177-341 W. Image credit: ESO / Aru et al., doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/202349004.

Young stars are surrounded by a disk of gas and dust the building materials for planets.

When other very bright and massive stars are present nearby, their light heats the young stars disk, stripping away part of its material.

Protoplanetary disks, composed of gas and dust, emerge as a consequence of the star formation process, and provide the birth-places of planetary systems, explained ESO astronomer Mari-Liis Aru and colleagues.

The evolutionary pathways of protoplanetary disks and their ability to form planets are expected to differ depending on the surrounding environment, with disks undergoing rapid changes in the presence of massive stars.

In massive clusters near OB-type stars, ultraviolet (UV) radiation can externally photoevaporate disks and severely diminish their size, mass, and survival timescale.

The astronomers used the MUSE instrument on ESOs Very Large Telescope to observe 177-341 W and 11 other proplyds in the Orion Nebula Cluster, which is about 400 parsecs distant from the Sun.

The stars eroding away the disk of 177-341 W are out of the frame past the upper-right corner, the researchers said.

When their radiation clashes with the material around the young star, it creates the bright, bow-like structure seen here in yellow.

The tail extending from the star towards the lower-left corner is material being dragged away from 177-341 W by the stars out of the field of view.

The colors shown in this image map different elements like hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen, they added.

But this is just a small fraction of all the data gathered by MUSE, which actually takes thousands of images at different colors or wavelengths simultaneously.

This allows us to study the physical properties of protoplanetary disks in great detail, including the amount of mass that they lose.

A paper on the findings appears in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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M.-L. Aru et al. 2024. Kaleidoscope of irradiated disks: MUSE observations of proplyds in the Orion Nebula Cluster. I. Sample presentation and ionization front sizes. A&A, in press; doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/202349004

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MUSE Spots Bizarre Stellar Object with Illuminated Protoplanetary Disk - Sci.News