Protostellar feedback halts the growth of the first stars in the universe

The first stars fundamentally transformed the early universe by emitting the first light and by producing the first heavy elements. These effects were predetermined by the mass distribution of the first stars, which is thought to have been fixed by a complex interplay of gas accretion and protostellar radiation. We performed radiation-hydrodynamics simulations that followed the growth of a primordial protostar through to the early stages as a star with thermonuclear burning. The circumstellar accretion disk was evaporated by ultraviolet radiation from the star when its mass was 43 times that of the Sun. Such massive primordial stars, in contrast to the often-postulated extremely massive stars, may help explain the fact that there are no signatures of the pair-instability supernovae in abundance patterns of metal-poor stars in our galaxy.     

Samples of stars beyond the solar system: silicate grains in interplanetary dust

We have identified six circumstellar silicate grains within interplanetary dust particles (IDPs). Their extrasolar origins are demonstrated by their extremely anomalous oxygen isotopic compositions. Three 17O-rich grains appear to originate from red giant or asymptotic giant branch stars. One 16O-rich grain may be from a metal-poor star. Two 16O-poor grains have unknown stellar sources. One of the grains is forsterite, and two are amorphous silicate "GEMS" (glass with embedded metal and sulfides), which is consistent with astronomical identifications of crystalline and amorphous silicates in the outflows of evolved stars. These observations suggest cometary origins of these IDPs and underscore the perplexing absence of silicates among circumstellar dust grains from meteorites.     

Laser guide star adaptive optics imaging polarimetry of Herbig Ae/Be stars

We have used laser guide star adaptive optics and a near-infrared dual-channel imaging polarimeter to observe light scattered in the circumstellar environment of Herbig Ae/Be stars on scales of 100 to 300 astronomical units. We revealed a strongly polarized, biconical nebula 10 arc seconds (6000 astronomical units) in diameter around the star LkHalpha 198 and also observed a polarized jet-like feature associated with the deeply embedded source LkHalpha 198-IR. The star LkHalpha 233 presents a narrow, unpolarized dark lane consistent with an optically thick circumstellar disk blocking our direct view of the star. These data show that the lower-mass T Tauri and intermediate mass Herbig Ae/Be stars share a common evolutionary sequence.     

The origin of OB runaway stars

About 20% of all massive stars in the Milky Way have unusually high velocities, the origin of which has puzzled astronomers for half a century. We argue that these velocities originate from strong gravitational interactions between single stars and binaries in the centers of star clusters. The ejecting binary forms naturally during the collapse of a young (≤1 million years old) star cluster. This model replicates the key characteristics of OB runaways in our galaxy, and it explains the presence of runaway stars of ≥100 solar masses (M(⊙)) around young star clusters, such as R136 and Westerlund 2. The high proportion and the distributions in mass and velocity of runaways in the Milky Way are reproduced if the majority of massive stars are born in dense and relatively low-mass (5000 to 10,000 M(⊙)) clusters.     

Supernova shock breakout from a red supergiant

Massive stars undergo a violent death when the supply of nuclear fuel in their cores is exhausted, resulting in a catastrophic "core-collapse" supernova. Such events are usually only detected at least a few days after the star has exploded. Observations of the supernova SNLS-04D2dc with the Galaxy Evolution Explorer space telescope reveal a radiative precursor from the supernova shock before the shock reached the surface of the star and show the initial expansion of the star at the beginning of the explosion. Theoretical models of the ultraviolet light curve confirm that the progenitor was a red supergiant, as expected for this type of supernova. These observations provide a way to probe the physics of core-collapse supernovae and the internal structures of their progenitor stars.     

ASTRONOMY: Enhanced: Water's Role in Making Stars

Water has long been believed to play an important role in star-forming regions as an oxygen reservoir and by cooling the circumstellar gas cloud, but observational evidence has been hard to come by. In her Perspective, Nisini explains how recent satellite missions have provided the first observational evidence that allows chemical models of star formation to be tested. Water is found to be initially low in abundance but to increase in abundance once a protostar has formed. The observations include protostars that are the precursors of sunlike stars, thus shedding light on water production in solar-type systems.     

Protostar formation in the early universe

The nature of the first generation of stars in the universe remains largely unknown. Observations imply the existence of massive primordial stars early in the history of the universe, and the standard theory for the growth of cosmic structure predicts that structures grow hierarchically through gravitational instability. We have developed an ab initio computer simulation of the formation of primordial stars that follows the relevant atomic and molecular processes in a primordial gas in an expanding universe. The results show that primeval density fluctuations left over from the Big Bang can drive the formation of a tiny protostar with a mass 1% that of the Sun. The protostar is a seed for the subsequent formation of a massive primordial star.     

The magnetic activity sunlike stars

Sunspots, flares, and the myriad time-varying "events" observable in the Sun-the only star whose surface we can examine in detail-are testimony that the Sun is a magnetically variable or active star. Its magnetic field, carried into interplanetary space by the solar wind, produces observable changes in Earth's magnetosphere and variations in the flux of galactic cosmic-ray particles incident upon Earth's upper atmosphere. Centuries of observation have enabled solar scientists to recognize that the Sun's magnetism exists and varies in a globally organized pattern that is somehow coupled to the Sun's rotation. Within the past decade O. C. Wilson demonstrated that analogs of solar activity exist and can be studied in many other dwarf stars. From the continuing study, knowledge of the precise rates of rotation of the stars under investigation is being gained for the first time. The results are expected to increase our understanding of the origin of solar activity and stellar activity in general.     

The galactic habitable zone and the age distribution of complex life in the Milky Way

We modeled the evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy to trace the distribution in space and time of four prerequisites for complex life: the presence of a host star, enough heavy elements to form terrestrial planets, sufficient time for biological evolution, and an environment free of life-extinguishing supernovae. We identified the Galactic habitable zone (GHZ) as an annular region between 7 and 9 kiloparsecs from the Galactic center that widens with time and is composed of stars that formed between 8 and 4 billion years ago. This GHZ yields an age distribution for the complex life that may inhabit our Galaxy. We found that 75% of the stars in the GHZ are older than the Sun.     

A brown dwarf mass donor in an accreting binary

A long-standing and unverified prediction of binary star evolution theory is the existence of a population of white dwarfs accreting from substellar donor stars. Such systems ought to be common, but the difficulty of finding them, combined with the challenge of detecting the donor against the light from accretion, means that no donor star to date has a measured mass below the hydrogen burning limit. We applied a technique that allowed us to reliably measure the mass of the unseen donor star in eclipsing systems. We were able to identify a brown dwarf donor star, with a mass of 0.052 +/- 0.002 solar mass. The relatively high mass of the donor star for its orbital period suggests that current evolutionary models may underestimate the radii of brown dwarfs.     

Lighting the universe with filaments

The first stars in the universe form when chemically pristine gas heats as it falls into dark-matter potential wells, cools radiatively because of the formation of molecular hydrogen, and becomes self-gravitating. Using supercomputer simulations, we demonstrated that the stars' properties depend critically on the currently unknown nature of the dark matter. If the dark-matter particles have intrinsic velocities that wipe out small-scale structure, then the first stars form in filaments with lengths on the order of the free-streaming scale, which can be approximately 10(20) meters (approximately 3 kiloparsecs, corresponding to a baryonic mass of approximately 10(7) solar masses) for realistic "warm dark matter" candidates. Fragmentation of the filaments forms stars with a range of masses, which may explain the observed peculiar element abundance pattern of extremely metal-poor stars, whereas coalescence of fragments and stars during the filament's ultimate collapse may seed the supermassive black holes that lurk in the centers of most massive galaxies.     

The formation and fragmentation of disks around primordial protostars

The very first stars to form in the universe heralded an end to the cosmic dark ages and introduced new physical processes that shaped early cosmic evolution. Until now, it was thought that these stars lived short, solitary lives, with only one extremely massive star, or possibly a very wide binary system, forming in each dark-matter minihalo. Here we describe numerical simulations that show that these stars were, to the contrary, often members of tight multiple systems. Our results show that the disks that formed around the first young stars were unstable to gravitational fragmentation, possibly producing small binary and higher-order systems that had separations as small as the distance between Earth and the Sun.     

Radio stars

Up to the present time six classes of radio stars have been established. The signals are almost always very faint and drastically variable. Hence their discovery has owed as much to serendipity as to the highly sophisticated equipment and techniques that have been used. When the variations are regular, as with the pulsars, this characteristic can be exploited very successfully in the search for new objects as well as in the detailed study of those that are already known. The detection of the most erratically variable radio stars, the flare stars and the x-ray stars, is primarily a matter of luck and patience. In the case of the novas, one at least knows where and oughly when to look for radio emission. A very sensitive interferometer is clearly the best instrument to use in the initial detection of a radio star. The fact that weak background sources are frequently present makes it essential to prove that the position of a radio source agrees with that of a star to within a few arc seconds. The potential of radio astronomy for the study of radio stars will not be realized until more powerful instruments than those that are available today can be utilized. So far, we have been able to see only the most luminous of the radio stars.     

Proximity of jupiter-like planets to low-mass stars

The sensitivities of astrometric and radial velocity searches for extrasolar planets are strongly dependent on planetary masses and orbits. Because most nearby stars are less massive than the sun, the first detection is likely to be of a Jupiter-mass planet orbiting a low-mass star, with a possible theoretical expectation being that Jupiter-like planets will be found much closer [inside the Earth-sun separation of 1 astronomical unit (AU)] to these low-luminosity stars than Jupiter is to the sun (5.2 AU). However, radiative hydrodynamic models of protoplanetary disks around low-mass stars (of 0.1 to 1 solar mass) show that Jupiter-like planets should form at distances (approximately 4 to 5 AU) that are only weakly dependent on the stellar mass.     

Detection of a red supergiant progenitor star of a type II-plateau supernova

We present the discovery of a red supergiant star that exploded as supernova 2003gd in the nearby spiral galaxy M74. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Gemini Telescope imaged this galaxy 6 to 9 months before the supernova explosion, and subsequent HST images confirm the positional coincidence of the supernova with a single resolved star that is a red supergiant of 8(+4)(-2) solar masses. This confirms both stellar evolution models and supernova theories predicting that cool red supergiants are the immediate progenitor stars of type II-plateau supernovae.     

Detection of pristine gas two billion years after the Big Bang

In the current cosmological model, only the three lightest elements were created in the first few minutes after the Big Bang; all other elements were produced later in stars. To date, however, heavy elements have been observed in all astrophysical environments. We report the detection of two gas clouds with no discernible elements heavier than hydrogen. These systems exhibit the lowest heavy-element abundance in the early universe, and thus are potential fuel for the most metal-poor halo stars. The detection of deuterium in one system at the level predicted by primordial nucleosynthesis provides a direct confirmation of the standard cosmological model. The composition of these clouds further implies that the transport of heavy elements from galaxies to their surroundings is highly inhomogeneous.     

Durability of the accretion disk of millisecond pulsars

Pulsars with pulsation periods in the millisecond range are thought to be neutron stars that have acquired an extraordinarily short spin period through the accretion of stellar material spiraling down onto the neutron star from a nearby companion. Nearly all the angular momentum and most of the mass of the companion star is transferred to the neutron star. During this process, wherein the neutron star consumes its companion, it is required that a disk of stellar material be formed around the neutron star. In conventional models it is supposed that the disk is somehow lost when the accretion phase is finished, so that only the rapidly spinning neutron star remains. However, it is possible that, after the accretion phase, a residual disk remains in stable orbit around the neutron star. The end result of such an accretion process is an object that looks much like a miniature (about 100 kilometers), heavy version of Saturn: a central object (the neutron star) surrounded by a durable disk.     

Discovery of a large dust disk around the nearby star AU Microscopii

We present the discovery of a circumstellar dust disk surrounding AU Microscopii (AU Mic, GJ 803, HD 197481). This young M star at 10 parsec has the same age and origin as beta Pictoris, another nearby star surrounded by a dust disk. The AU Mic disk is detected between 50 astronomical units (AU) and 210 AU radius, a region where dust lifetimes exceed the present stellar age. Thus, AU Mic is the nearest star where we directly observe the solid material required for planet formation. Because 85% of stars are M-type, the AU Mic disk provides new clues on how the majority of planetary systems might form and evolve.