LOS ANGELES, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Researchers of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have discovered a young star in the midst of a rare growth spurt -- a dramatic phase of stellar evolution when matter swirling around a star falls onto the star, bulking up its mass.
The star belongs to a class of fitful stars known as FU Ori's, said a release of Caltech on Tuesday. Typically, these stars, which are less than a few million years old, are hidden behind thick clouds of dust and are hard to observe.
This new object is only the 25th member of this class found to date and one of only about a dozen caught in the act of an outburst, said the release.
"These FU Ori events are extremely important in our current understanding of the process of star formation but have remained almost mythical because they have been so difficult to observe," said Lynne Hillenbrand, professor of astronomy at Caltech and lead author of a new report on the findings appearing in The Astrophysical Journal.
"This is actually the first time we've ever seen one of these events as it happens in both optical and infrared light, and these data have let us map the movement of material through the disk and onto the star," Hillenbrand said.
The newfound star, called Gaia 17bpi, was first spotted by the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite. When Gaia spots a change in a star's brightness, an alert goes out to the astronomy community. A graduate student at the University of Exeter and co-author of the new study, Sam Morrell, was the first to notice that the star had brightened.
Other members of the team then followed up, and discovered that the star's brightening had been serendipitously captured in infrared light by NASA's asteroid-hunting NEOWISE satellite at the same time that Gaia saw it, as well as one-and-a-half-years earlier.
The new findings shed some light on a portion of the longstanding mysteries surrounding the evolution of young stars.
