Unearthly beauty: astronomers first saw the birth of a double star

We, the inhabitants of the solar system, can hardly imagine that instead of one luminary there can be two or even three at once in the sky. Meanwhile, systems consisting of several stars are very common in the Universe, and astronomers are watching them with great interest. Not so long ago, an international team of scientists managed to observe a double star in the initial stage of et formation, and this process turned out to be incredibly beautiful.

Seeing the birth of a new star with your own eyes is a rare success, and watching the birth of a double star can be considered incredible luck. This was done with the help of ALMA radio telescopes installed in the Chilean desert of Atacama, and an international team of scientists led by German astrophysicists witnessed a unique event.

The scene of this astronomical representation is the Tube Nebula. Here, at a distance of 600 light-years from Earth, a cloud of interstellar dust and gas formed, which gave rise to several stars at once. Among others, a binary star system called BHB2007 11 was formed there, which astronomers managed to fix.

Despite the fact that this stellar pair is at the very beginning of its formation, it is already clearly visible that each of the stars has its own substance inside a common gas-dust cloud and a separate circumstellar disk. Astrophysicists also managed to find out that one of the luminaries has a slightly larger mass. According to scientists, in the future they will turn into a pair of stars like the blue giant and will have a significant mass many times greater than the solar one. In the meantime, scientists managed to see how both young stars revolve around a common center of mass, leaving magnificent plumes behind them.

Based on these observations, it cannot be said whether all binary stars are born in this way. For this reason, astronomers have so far refrained from preliminary conclusions and hope in the near future to see the nucleation of other systems consisting of several stars. In any case, the observation of young stars from the Tube nebula allowed scientists to obtain unique information about the origin of binary star systems in the Universe.