Stars are formed in cold cosmic clouds. Most of the time they form in groups as “clusters”, and scientists believe that this is in denser areas known as Infrared Dark Clouds. When the temperature of one of these clouds surpasses -160 °C, it is classified as a “hot core” and there is a large concentration of organic compounds. Wait, that doesn’t seem very hot, does it? Well even though it seems ridiculously cold to us, it’s roughly 100 °C hotter than the regular cloud.

(Different infrared dark cloud) – http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Cepheus_B.jpg

Recently, a very young small star was seen to have an extremely massive hot core by radio telescopes in Chile. The age of the protostar is estimated to be 740 years as calculated by the speed of gaseous output. It isn’t known why exactly this star is so hot, or why the surrounding hot cloud is ten times the average size of what we have observed before. One potential explanation is that the extreme mass of the cloud caused the large hot core by increasing the rate at which gravitational potential energy is converted to thermal energy. Another potential explanation is that there are more than one protostar inside the hot core. 

The lesson that should be taken from this new observation is that there is more opportunity for variety in the creation of stars than we originally thought. Perhaps we do not understand nearly as much about the star formation process(es) as we thought. The next question to investigate for these scientists is: what is the cause of this young star’s extremely large infrared dark cloud?

Sources:

National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. “Astronomers discover large ‘hot’ cocoon around a small baby star.” ScienceDaily, 4 Oct. 2013. Web. 6 Oct. 2013.