By Amit Malewar Published: August 21, 2025
Collected at: https://www.techexplorist.com/invisible-interstellar-highways-feeding-universe-giant-stars/100717/
Stars are born in all kinds of cosmic cradles, but the huge ones, 8+ times the Sun’s mass, grow fast and furious. As they form, they blast out winds and radiation, which should blow away the gas they need to grow. So how do they bulk up so quickly?
Astronomers think these baby stars have spinning disks of gas around them, like giant space pizza dough. Thanks to the laws of motion, these disks stick around and act like feeding funnels, channeling gas straight into the star’s core.
We know something’s feeding these stellar beasts… but the exact recipe for their rapid growth? Still a cosmic cliffhanger.
Forget dusty disks, astronomers from Kyoto University and the University of Tokyo have spotted massive gas streamers feeding young giant stars. These streamers stretch across thousands of astronomical units, acting like interstellar highways, delivering fuel from far-off regions straight into the heart of star formation.
To see these distant stellar nurseries in detail, the team needed a telescope with super-sharp vision. Hence, they used ALMA, a powerful array in Chile that can detect dust and gas at millimeter wavelengths, like a cosmic microscope.
Instead of a neat spinning disk, they saw twisting streamers spiraling toward the star, acting like giant straws made of gas, funneling material from far away straight into the star’s belly.
The research team expected to see a dust disk or torus of several hundred astronomical units in size, but they did not expect the spiral arms to reach as close to the central source.
One of these streamers isn’t just delivering gas, it’s twisting as it flows, showing signs of rotation and infall. That means it’s spiraling inward, like water down a drain, feeding the star with such intensity that it overpowers the star’s feedback, the pushback that usually slows down growth.
This relentless feeding creates a super-dense region around the star, like a traffic jam of gas and dust. It’s a rare glimpse into how massive stars bulk up despite the odds.
“We found streamers feeding what at that time was thought to be a disk, but to our surprise, there is either no disk or it is tiny,” says Olguin.
Turns out, massive stars might not need a fancy rotating disk to bulk up. Instead, streamers can do the job solo, hauling in matter even when the central star is pushing back with intense feedback.
The research team is now expanding its cosmic investigation. They’re scanning other star-forming regions to ask: Is this streamer-fed growth a universal phenomenon?
They’re also peering closer, right into the gas hugging the star, to see if tiny disks are hiding in plain sight. If they find them, it could reshape how we think about stellar diets. If not, streamers might steal the spotlight.
Journal Reference:
- Fernando A. Olguin, Patricio Sanhueza, Adam Ginsburg, Huei-Ru Vivien Chen, Kei E. I. Tanaka, Xing Lu, Kaho Morii, Fumitaka Nakamura, Shanghuo Li, Yu Cheng, Qizhou Zhang, Qiuyi Luo, Yoko Oya, Takeshi Sakai, Masao Saito, Andrés E. Guzmán. Massive extended streamers feed high-mass young stars. Science Advances, 2025; 11 (34) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adw4512
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