What is the stars? Dubs have answer for Seán O’Casey
IT WAS Joxer who asked ‘What is the stars?’ in Seán O’Casey’s 1925 play Juno And The Paycock, and now a team of scientists from his hometown believe they have the answer.
A group from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) has directly observed for the first time how young stars gain weight by taking in huge amounts of matter surrounding them, possibly giving new insights into how our own solar system was formed. Dr Rebeca García López of DIAS and University College Dublin, who led the team, said: ‘Previously, scientists suspected new stars and planets were born from matter surrounding existing stars. However, this was not confirmed until we carried out our ground-breaking study and saw first-hand the process in action.’
Professor Tom Ray of DIAS’s School of Cosmic Physics, coauthor of the work, said the findings help scientists to better understand how stars, such as the Sun, form and how the discs surrounding these stellar embryos give rise to planets such as the Earth.
Their work was published yesterday in the prestigious Nature journal.
The team detected how columns of matter rain down onto a newborn star from its surrounding disc. Such discs not only give birth to stars but also planetary systems like our own.
To make the discovery, the team used the high-precision GRAVITY ‘super-telescope’ at the European Southern Observatory, which has a major observatory in Chile.
The team focused on a star called TW Hydra, which is about 196 light-years away, and is the closest young star observable from Earth. ‘By using the GRAVITY instrument, our team was able to analyse stars with an unprecedented level of detail,’ Dr García López said.
The research was in part supported by the Science Foundation Ireland and the European Research Council. Ireland is the most recent member of the European Southern Observatory, and joined in 2018. The then Minister of State for Research, John Halligan, said at the time he hoped it would help develop our understanding of the universe.