From McDonald Observatory, U Texas at Austin: “Magnetic Waves Create Chaos in Star-Forming Clouds”

From McDonald Observatory, U Texas at Austin

12 September 2018

Rebecca Johnson, Communications Mgr.
rjohnson@astro.as.utexas.edu
McDonald Observatory
The University of Texas at Austin
512-475-6763

Science Contact:
Dr. Stella Offner, Asst. Professor
soffner@astro.as.utexas.edu
Department of Astronomy
The University of Texas at Austin
512-471-3853

Offner’s research will shed light on the processes inside star-forming regions such as 30 Doradus, seen in this view from Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/ESA/F. Paresce/R. O’Connell/WFC3

NASA/ESA Hubble Telescope

NASA/ESA Hubble WFC3

New research by Stella Offner, assistant professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin, finds that magnetic waves are an important factor driving the process of star formation within the enormous clouds that birth stars. Her research sheds light on the processes that are responsible for setting the properties of stars, which in turn affects the formation of planets orbiting them, and, ultimately, life on those planets. The research is published in the current issue of the journal Nature Astronomy.

Offner used a supercomputer to make models of the multitude of processes happening inside a cloud where stars are forming, in an effort to sort out which processes lead to which effects.

Assets of The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center were used in this work.

https://www.mghpcc.org/

“These clouds are violent places,” Offner said. “It’s an extreme environment with all kinds of different physics happening at once,” including gravity and turbulence as well as radiation and winds from forming stars (called stellar feedback). The fundamental question, Offner said, is: “Why are the motions in these clouds so violent?”

Some astronomers attribute the observed motions to gravitational collapse, while others attribute it to turbulence and stellar feedback. Offner wanted to test these theories and study how stars shape their birth environment, but it’s virtually impossible to use telescope observations of these clouds to separate the influence of the various processes, she said.

“That’s why we need computer models,” Offner explained.

After comparing models of clouds with gravity, magnetic fields, and stars, Offner noticed extra motions.

Her models showed that stellar winds interacting with the cloud magnetic field generated energy and influenced gas at far greater distances across the cloud than previously thought: These local magnetic fields caused action at a distance.

“Think of the magnetic fields like rubber bands that stretch across the cloud,” Offner said. “The winds push the field — it’s like rubber bands being plucked. The waves outrun the wind and cause distant motions.”

This research has implications for the tug-of-war between feedback — that is, the effect that the newly formed star has on its environment — and gravity on the scale of solar systems up to entire galaxies, Offner said.

As for the next step, Offner says she plans to study this process on larger scales, both in time and space. Her current study focused on one area within star-forming clouds; she said future studies will study the effects of magnetic fields and feedback on scales larger than a single cloud.

See the full article here .

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Telescopes Are Windows To the Universe

Astronomers use them to study everything from the asteroids and planets in our own solar system to galaxies billions of light-years away in space and time. Though they bring the mysteries of the universe to us, their workings are anything but mysterious. They gather and focus light from objects in the sky, so that it can be directed into an instrument attached to the telescope, and ultimately, studied in detail by a scientist. At McDonald Observatory, we have several telescopes, built at various times since the Observatory’s founding in the 1930s.

Here is an introduction to the telescopes that McDonald Observatory astronomers use for their research:

Hobby-Eberly Telescope

Harlan J. Smith Telescope

Otto Struve Telescope

0.8-meter Telescope

0.9-meter Telescope

Rebecca Gale Telescope Park

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In 1839, the Congress of the Republic of Texas ordered that a site be set aside to meet the state’s higher education needs. After a series of delays over the next several decades, the state legislature reinvigorated the project in 1876, calling for the establishment of a “university of the first class.” Austin was selected as the site for the new university in 1881, and construction began on the original Main Building in November 1882. Less than one year later, on Sept. 15, 1883, The University of Texas at Austin opened with one building, eight professors, one proctor, and 221 students — and a mission to change the world. Today, UT Austin is a world-renowned higher education, research, and public service institution serving more than 51,000 students annually through 18 top-ranked colleges and schools.