Artist’s Impression Video of a Baby Star TMC-1A

1 March, 2016 / Read time: 1 minute

This video shows an artist’s impression of the protostar TMC-1A, located 450 light-years from us in the Taurus constellation. The young star is surrounded by a gas disk that feeds it. There are more dispersed gas molecules that surround the disk and fall into it progressively like a blanket, thus increasing its size. 

The observation with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) enabled a scientific team to determine for the first time the boundaries between the disk surrounding a protostar and the “envelope” of scattered gas. This discovery will help us to better understand the initial stages of star formation.

Credit: National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ)