May 17, 2001

1 min read

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Bubble-Blowing Star Baffles Astronomers

By Kate Wong

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Astronomers using the Very Long Baseline Array¿a set of 10 radio telescopes spread across the U.S.¿have discovered what appears to be a young star blowing a bubble of gas around itself. The new findings, published today in the journal Nature, could force scientists to revise existing theories of star formation.

For two months, Paul Ho of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and his colleagues watched a spherical bubble expand around a presumed star. Calculations indicate that the star belched the bubble into space only 33 years ago. Yet the bubble is expanding so quickly¿about nine kilometers a second¿that it will soon disappear altogether.

The team's observations come as a surprise because stellar formation theories hold that although nascent stars should shed energy as they develop, they should do so by spewing forth jets of material from their poles¿not by blowing spherical bubbles. Before rewriting the astronomy books, however, researchers will have to show that the object that produced the enigmatic bubble is in fact a young star. This seems likely considering that the object occupies a star-forming region, Philip Diamond of the University of Manchester told Nature Science Update. "But until we see what's in the middle we won't know."

Kate Wong is an award-winning science writer and senior editor for features at Scientific American, where she has focused on evolution, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, paleontology and animal behavior. She is fascinated by human origins, which she has covered for nearly 30 years. Recently she has become obsessed with birds. Her reporting has taken her to caves in France and Croatia that Neandertals once called home to the shores of Kenya’s Lake Turkana in search of the oldest stone tools in the world, as well as to Madagascar on an expedition to unearth ancient mammals and dinosaurs, the icy waters of Antarctica, where humpback whales feast on krill, and a “Big Day” race around the state of Connecticut to find as many bird species as possible in 24 hours. Wong is co-author, with Donald Johanson, of Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins. She holds a bachelor of science degree in biological anthropology and zoology from the University of Michigan. Follow her on Bluesky @katewong.bsky.social

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