A Circumstellar Disk Observed around a Massive Star

摘要

Although the formation process of low-mass stars like our Sun has been well understood, the birth of high-mass stars with more than eight solar masses still remains a mystery. A recent study by CAS astronomers and their collaborators from Japan and UK offered direct observational evidence for demystifying the puzzle. The work was published in the Sept. 1 issue of Nature. Currently there are two major rival hypotheses for the massive star formation. In one scenario, the process occurs when several low-mass young stellar objects collide and merge within a highly crowded star-forming region. In the other scenario, such a star is formed by accretion from a circumstellar disk, which is a flattened system of dust and gas surrounding a protostar at the center, in the same way as its low-mass cousins are formed.