Scientists have captured the birth of a star using a giant radio telescope in Chile, Space.com reported.
The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope, a joint project between North America, Europe and Asia, captured images of the star about 1,400 light years from Earth.
The brand new star was seen releasing material at just under 85,000 mph, sending it crashing into surrounding gas, causing a glow.
Researchers hope the discovery will help them understand the complex processes stars undergo during birth. The latest observation showed the material streaking out of the star at 40 kilometers per second, much faster than any previous observation.
"The sun is a star, so if we want to understand how our solar system was created, we need to understand how stars are formed," Héctor Arce, the lead author of the study published Tuesday in the Astrophysical Journal, said in a statement.
"This system is similar to most isolated low mass stars during their formation and birth," Diego Mardones, a co-author of the study detailing the stellar findings said in a statement. "But it is also unusual because the outflow impacts the cloud directly on one side of the young star and escapes out of the cloud on the other. This makes it an excellent system for studying the impact of the stellar winds on the parent cloud from which the young star is formed."
ALMA captured the images in five hours and caught various details previous observations did not because of its sensitive components.
ALMA is $1.6 billion array of 66 radio telescopes that come together to make one of the most powerful telescopes of any kind ever built. The telescope allows scientists to see spacial objects normally masked by dust and gas.
"ALMA's exquisite sensitivity allows the detection of previously unseen features in this source, like this very fast outflow," Arce said. "It also seems to be a textbook example of a simple model where the molecular outflow is generated by a wide-angle wind from the young star."
