The spectacular moment universe's newest and youngest star 'was born'
Astronomers at the American Ivy League universities discovered the youngest known star in the Perseus star-forming region, about 800 light-years or more than 4700 trillion miles away from the Milky Way. Despite its tiny size, scientists believe they caught the precise moment the star, called L1448-IRS2E, was formed born. It is the most detailed glimpse of a star's birth to date and is undetectable to the naked eye or amateur astronomers. Read more
Astronomers have glimpsed what could be the youngest known star at the very moment it is being born. Not yet fully developed into a true star, the object is in the earliest stages of star formation and has just begun pulling in matter from a surrounding envelope of gas and dust, according to a new study that appears in the current issue of the Astrophysical Journal. The studys authors - who include astronomers from Yale University, the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany - found the object using the Submillimeter Array in Hawaii and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Known as L1448-IRS2E, its located in the Perseus star-forming region, about 800 light years away within our Milky Way galaxy. Read more