https://phys.org/news/2020-03-massive-stars.html On the origin of massive stars by ESA/Hubble Information Centre Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, I. Stephens This scene of stellar creation, captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, sits near the outskirts of the famous Tarantula Nebula. This cloud of gas and dust, as well as the many young and massive stars surrounding it, is the perfect laboratory to study the origin of massive stars. The bright pink cloud and the young stars surrounding it in this image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have the uninspiring name LHA 120-N 150. This region of space is located on the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula, which is the largest known stellar nursery in the local Universe. The nebula is situated over 160 000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring irregular dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way. The Large Magellanic Cloud has had one or more close encounters in the past, possibly with the Small Magellanic Cloud. These interactions have caused an episode of energetic star formation in our tiny neighbor—part of which is visible as the Tarantula Nebula. more at link.... the paper: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/834/1/94 STELLAR CLUSTERINGS AROUND "ISOLATED" MASSIVE YSOs IN THE LMC: Abstract: Observations suggest that there is a significant fraction of O stars in the field of the Milky Way that appear to have formed in isolation or in low-mass clusters (<100 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!). The existence of these high-mass stars that apparently formed in the field challenges the generally accepted paradigm, which requires star formation to occur in clustered environments. In order to understand the physical conditions for the formation of these stars, it is necessary to observe isolated high-mass stars while they are still forming. With the Hubble Space Telescope, we observe the seven most isolated massive (>8 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) young stellar objects (MYSOs) in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The observations show that while these MYSOs are remote from other MYSOs, OB associations, and even known giant molecular clouds, they are actually not isolated at all. Imaging reveals ~100 to several hundred pre-main-sequence (PMS) stars in the vicinity of each MYSO. These previously undetected PMS stars form prominent compact clusters around the MYSOs, and in most cases they are also distributed sparsely across the observed regions. Contrary to what previous high-mass field star studies show, these observations suggest that high-mass stars may not be able to form in clusters with masses less than 100 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!. If these MYSOs are indeed the best candidates for isolated high-mass star formation, then the lack of isolation is at odds with random sampling of the initial mass function. Moreover, while isolated MYSOs may not exist, we find evidence that isolated clusters containing O stars can exist, which in itself is rare.
Thanks for posting. Not only this but all the articles that you post. I certainly appreciate you going to the trouble. Alex
