The supply of massive stellar embryos with food from their surrounding disk of gas and dust has long been a mystery. An international research team, in which the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy is participating, has now discovered a spiral structure in such a disk, in the centre of which a growing star of about 12 solar masses has experienced a dramatic increase in brightness. This spiral confirms the hypothesis that such disks become temporarily unstable and therefore partially disintegrate into compact packets. These feed the young star in bites, resulting in episodes of sharply increasing luminosity. The results are published today in the journal Nature Astronomy.
On the one hand, this radiation was based on a special form of methanol, in which