close look at stars



Two international teams of astronomers observed with unprecedented detail the environment of two stars. Thanks to the newly installed AMBER instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer. The instrument combines the light from two or three 8.2-m Unit Telescopes thereby amounting to observe with a telescope of 40 to 90 meters in diameter.



The new results provide useful information on the conditions leading to the creation of planets. One of the stars is young and still forming. On the contrary, the other star is entering the latest stages of its life. In both cases, the astronomers found evidence for a surrounding disc. The astronomers could achieve an amazing amount of details observing an object located more than 800 light-years away and hidden by a large amount of gas and dust. They found the object to be surrounded by a proto-planetary disc extending to about the size of our Solar System, but truncated in his inner part until about half the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Moreover, the object was found to be surrounded by an out-flowing wind, the velocity of which increased by a factor 9, from about 70 km/s near the disc to 600 km/s in the polar regions.



Via: Eureka Alert, more...