Astronomers have spotted a rare and dramatic cosmic event: a baby star that fired off an enormous jet of energy, triggering an explosion—and then got caught in the blast it created.
The finding suggests that young stars and their developing planets may face harsher, more violent environments than scientists previously thought.
The research, published in The Astrophysical Journal, sheds new light on how stars and planets form. Stars are born inside huge, cold clouds of gas and dust.
As the cloud collapses under gravity, it begins to spin, forming a flattened, rotating disk called a protoplanetary disk. This disk is where planets eventually take shape.
Not all the material in the disk becomes part of the star or planets. Some of it is ejected into space in narrow, high-speed jets that shoot out along the star’s rotation axis. These jets help the young system shed excess matter and spin.
While reanalyzing old data from the powerful ALMA radio telescope in Chile, a team of Japanese astronomers noticed something unusual near a young star called WSB 52, located about 441 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus.
Surrounding the star’s disk was a large, expanding bubble of gas—evidence of a past explosion. Even more surprising, the edge of this bubble, known as a shock front, was crashing directly into the star’s disk and warping it.
Such bubbles have been spotted before around young stars, but this is the first time scientists have seen one clearly slamming into a protoplanetary disk. This interaction had never been predicted in theory, making the discovery all the more unexpected.
The alignment of the bubble with the disk’s rotation axis provided a crucial clue. The researchers concluded that the explosion was triggered by the star itself.
Hundreds of years ago, WSB 52 likely blasted out a jet of material at incredible speed. That jet smashed into a nearby pocket of cold gas, compressing it so much that it exploded outward, creating the bubble.
Masataka Aizawa of Ibaraki University, who led the study, compared the event to a scene from science fiction. “In movies, you sometimes see a beam fired at something, causing an explosion with debris flying back at the shooter. Similar things happen in space, but on a far greater scale,” he said.
This back-and-forth blast is more than just a spectacular show—it could have serious consequences for planet formation. The shockwave’s collision with the disk could disrupt the delicate process of building planets, or even strip away material entirely.
The researchers now hope to investigate whether such violent feedback events are common. If they are, young planets may need to survive far more cosmic chaos than scientists once imagined.
Source: KSR.
