Astronomers have discovered fast-moving carbon monoxide moving away from a small young star. It
Astronomers observed the entire process usingarray of radio telescopes located in Chile's Atacama Desert (ALMA) as part of a survey of young "class III" stars. Some of these stars are surrounded by disks of debris thought to have formed from collisions between comets, asteroids, and other rocky objects. The dust and debris left over from these collisions absorbs the light from their central stars and re-radiates that energy as a faint glow that can be studied with ALMA.
During the survey, the star under consideration, NO Lup,which makes up about 70% of the mass of our Sun, a faint dusty disk of low mass was detected, but it was the only class III star that gave off carbon monoxide. NO Lup is more evolved, and it may have lost this primordial gas after the planets formed.
Even that we found a carbon monoxide leaksurprising as ALMA has not previously acquired images of other young stars of this type. But when we looked closely, we found something even more unusual the gas was far from the star and was moving much faster than expected.
Joshua Lovell, PhD student at the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy
Further analysis showed that the gas canform during collisions between asteroids or during periods of sublimation (transitions from solid to gaseous phase), as well as on the surface of stellar comets, which are expected to have vast reserves of carbon monoxide ice.
Astronomers believe that studying this star sheds light on the physical processes that shape planetary systems shortly after their birth.
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