July 1, 2014

Young suns violent history solves meteorite mystery

Astronomers using ESA's Herschel space observatory to probe the turbulent beginnings of a Sun-like star have found evidence of mighty stellar winds that could solve a puzzling meteorite mystery in our own back yard.

 ESA/Herschel/Ph. André, D. Polychroni, A. Roy, V. Könyves, N. Schneider for the Gould Belt survey Key Programme; inset and layout: ESA/ATG medialabUsing Herschel to survey the chemical composition of regions where stars are being born today, a team of astronomers has noticed that one object in particular is different.

The unusual source is a prolific stellar nursery called OMC2 FIR4, a clump of new stars embedded in a gaseous and dusty cloud near to the famous Orion Nebula.

"To our great surprise, we found that the proportion of two chemical species, one based on carbon and oxygen and the other on nitrogen, is much smaller in this object than in any other protostar we know," says Dr Cecilia Ceccarelli, of the Institute de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble, France, who lead the study with Dr Carsten Dominik of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

"The most likely cause in this environment is a violent wind of very energetic particles, released by at least one of the embryonic stars taking shape in this proto-stellar cocoon," Dr Ceccarelli adds.

Astronomers think that a similarly violent wind of particles also gusted through the early Solar System, and this discovery might finally point to an explanation for the origin of a particular chemical element seen in meteorites.

"Some elements detected in meteorites reveal that, long ago, these rocks contained a form of beryllium: this is quite puzzling, as we can't quite understand how it got there," explains Dr Dominik.

The formation of beryllium-10 isotope was formed in collisions of very energetic particles with heavier elements like oxygen. But since this isotope decays very quickly into other elements, it must have been produced just before it was incorporated in the rocks that would later appear on Earth as meteorites.

In order to trigger these reactions and produce an amount of beryllium matching that recorded in meteorites, our own Sun must have blown a violent wind in its youth.

References:

"Herschel finds evidence for stellar wind particles in a protostellar envelope: is this what happened to the young Sun?" by C. Ceccarelli et al. is published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, July 2014. doi:10.1088/2041-8205/790/1/L1

Read the complete news on ESA's website