Astronomers have glimpsed a star which is probably less than 10 000
years old, making it the youngest ever seen. The object, strictly a ‘protostar’,
is still pulling in matter.
Philippe Andre of the Centre d’Etudes de Saclay, France, Derek Ward-Thompson
of the University of Cambridge and Mary Barsony of the Harvard-Smithsonian
Centre for Astrophysics found the protostar, called VLA 1623, in a region
of star formation known as &rgr; Ophiuchi A. It is deeply embedded within a
dusty envelope of infalling matter.
Andre and his colleagues found the record-breaking protostar when they
used the James Clark Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii to make an infrared map
of the region. The envelope surrounding VLA 1623 has a diameter 25 times
as big as our Solar System and it contains only 0.6 times the mass of the
Sun.
The infrared map of &rgr; Ophiuchi A also showed three other objects which
appear to be denser regions of the cloud on the verge of collapsing into
protostars.
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