The galactic center at a distance of about 30000 light years. In the center of the image is the supermassive black hole Sgr A* (not visible). The position of Sgr A* can be deduced from the motion of the stars. Because of the dust cloud and its dimensions around X3a, the baby star is also not visible in this image. Credit: Florian Peißker
A team of international researchers led by Dr. Florian Peißker at the Institute of Astrophysics at the University of Cologne has discovered a newly formed star near the supermassive black holeSagittarius A*, located in the center of The Milky Way.
The newly discovered star, called baby star X3a, is incredibly young with an age estimated to be only several tens of thousands of years old, making it younger than humans species. The remarkable aspect of this star is its proximity to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, as theoretically it should not be able to exist so close to the black hole.
However, the team believes that it formed in a cloud of dust that orbited the giant black hole and only sank to its current orbit after it formed. The study was recently published in That Astrophysical Journal.
The vicinity of the black hole at the center of our galaxy is generally considered to be a region characterized by highly dynamic processes and strong X-ray and UV radiation.
These very conditions work against the formation of stars like our Sun. Therefore, scientists had long assumed that over periods of billions of years, only old, evolved stars can settle by dynamical friction near the supermassive black hole.
But quite surprisingly, very young stars were already found in the immediate vicinity of Sgr A* twenty years ago. It is still not clear how these stars got there or where they formed. The occurrence of very young stars very close to the supermassive black hole has been referred to as the “paradox of youth”.
The baby star X3a – which is ten times as large and fifteen times as heavy as our Sun – could now close the gap between star formation and the young stars in the immediate vicinity of Sgr A*. X3a needs special conditions to form in the immediate vicinity of the black hole.
First author Dr. Florian Peißker explained: “It turns out that there is a region at a distance of a few light-years from the black hole that meets the conditions for star formation. This region, a ring of gas and dust, is sufficiently cold and protected from destructive radiation .”
Low temperatures and high densities create an environment where clouds of hundreds of solar masses can form. These clouds can, in principle, move very quickly in the direction of the black hole due to cloud-cloud collisions and scattering that remove the angular momentum.
In addition, very hot clumps formed close to the baby star, which could then be accreted by X3a. These clumps could thus also contribute to X3a reaching such a high mass in the first place. However, these clumps are only part of the formation history of X3a. They still don’t explain its “birth”.
The researchers assume that the following scenario is possible: shielded from the gravitational influence of Sgr A* and intense radiation, a dense enough cloud could have formed in the outer ring of gas and dust around the center of the galaxy. This cloud had a mass of about a hundred suns and collapsed under its own gravity into one or more protostars.
“This so-called decay time roughly corresponds to the age of X3a,” Peißker added. Observations have shown that there are many of these clouds that can interact with each other. It is therefore likely that a cloud will fall towards the black hole from time to time.
This scenario would also fit the stellar evolution stage of X3a, which is currently evolving into a mature star. It is therefore quite plausible that the gas and dust ring acts as the birthplace of the young stars in the center of our galaxy.
Dr. Michal Zajaček of the Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic), a co-author of the study, clarified: “With its high mass of about ten times the mass of the Sun, X3a is a giant among stars, and these giants evolve very quickly towards maturity. We have been lucky to spot the massive star at the center of the comet-shaped circumstellar envelope. Subsequently, we identified key features associated with a young age, such as the compact circumstellar envelope rotating around it.”
Since similar rings of dust and gas can be found in other galaxies, the described mechanism could also apply there. Many galaxies can therefore host very young stars at their centers. Planned observations with NASA‘s James Webb Space Telescope or the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope in Chile will test this star formation model for our galaxy as well as others.
Reference: “X3: A High-mass Young Stellar Object Close to the Supermassive Black Hole Sgr A*” by Florian Peißker, Michal Zajaček, Nadeen B. Sabha, Masato Tsuboi, Jihane Moultaka, Lucas Labadie, Andreas Eckart, Vladimír Karas, Lukas Steiniger, Matthias Subroweit, Anjana Suresh, Maria Melamed and Yann Clénet, 28 Feb 2023, The Astrophysical Journal.
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aca977