Astronomers first spotted FU Orionis brightening 1,000 times in 1937. Now, they finally think they know why, thanks to ALMA.
Artist’s impression of one of the two stars in the FU Orionis binary system, surrounded by an accreting disk of material. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Here’s what scientists do know about FU Ori stars and their variability. They brighten when they attract gas gravitationally into an accretion disk. Too much mass at once can destabilize the disk, and as material falls into the star, it brightens. But what they didn’t understand was why and how this happened.
This figure from the research shows 12CO and 13CO emissions as detected by ALMA. The colours denote velocity. The CO streamer of infalling gas is labelled. “The elongated feature has a connection neither to the larger-scale molecular outflow nor to the inner disk rotation and is more similar to accretion streamers recently reported around young stellar objects,” the authors explain. Image Credit: Hales et al. 2024.
This image from the research shows the model results overlain on ALMA data. The streamer modelling closely matches the data. “The fitting results suggest that the morphology and the velocity profile of the observed streamer emission can be well represented as a trail of infalling gas,” the authors write in their published research. Image Credit: Hales et al. 2024.
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