For the first time, astronomers have observed a conveyor belt from the outskirts of a star-forming dense cloud directly depositing material near a pair of young forming stars. Scientists at the German Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) and the French Institut de Radioastonomie Millimétrique (IRAM) found that gas motions in the conveyor belt, dubbed a “streamer,” mainly obey the gravitational pull of the innermost part of the core, near the protostar pair. The streamer delivers a large amount of gas with chemicals recently produced in the mother cloud surrounding the star-forming region directly to the young protostars at the center of the core. These results are striking evidence that the large-scale environment around forming stars has an important influence on small-scale disk formation and evolution.
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Source: Phys.org