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Astronomers reveal first hot core found in Milky Way

Published

8 years ago

October 2, 2016

Astronomers reveal first hot core found in Milky Way

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, a team of astronomers reveal the first hot core to be found outside the Milky Way.

A hot and dense mass of complex molecules, cocooning a newborn star, has been discovered by a Japanese team of astronomers using ALMA. This unique hot molecular core is the first of its kind to have been detected outside the Milky Way galaxy.

It has a very different molecular composition from similar objects in our own galaxy — a tantalizing hint that the chemistry taking place across the Universe could be much more diverse than expected.

A team of Japanese researchers have used the power of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to observe a massive star known as ST11 in our neighboring dwarf galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Emission from a number of molecular gases was detected.

These indicated that the team had discovered a concentrated region of comparatively hot and dense molecular gas around the newly ignited star ST11. This was evidence that they had found something never before seen outside of the Milky Way — a hot molecular core.

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