In lieu of a working time machine, we learn about the birth of our Sun and its planets by studying young stars in our galaxy. New work suggests that our Sun was both active and “feisty” in its infancy, growing in fits and starts while burping out bursts of X-rays.
“By studying TW Hydrae, we can watch what happened to our Sun when it was a toddler,” said Nancy Brickhouse of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Brickhouse and her colleagues reached this conclusion by studying the young star TW Hydrae, which is located about 190 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation Hydra the Water Snake. TW Hydrae is an orange type K star weighing about 80 percent as much as our Sun. It is about 10 million years old and is still accreting gas from a surrounding disk of material. That same disk might contain newborn planets.
In order to grow, the star “eats” gas from the disk. However, the disk doesn’t extend all the way to the star’s surface, so the star can’t dine from it directly. Instead, infalling gas gets funneled along magnetic field lines to the star’s poles.
Fortunately, we are looking almost directly down on one of the star’s poles. As a result, scientists can study the accretion process in detail. “We’re looking right where the action is,” said Andrea Dupree of the CfA.
Infalling material smashes into the star, creating a shock wave and heating the accreting gas to temperatures greater than 5 million degrees Fahrenheit (2.8 million degrees Celsius). The gas glows with high-energy X-rays. As it continues moving inward, the gas cools, and its glow shifts to optical wavelengths of light. To study the process, Brickhouse and her team combined observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory with those from ground-based optical telescopes.
“By gathering data in multiple wavelengths, we followed the gas all the way down. We traced the whole accretion process for the first time,” said Brickhouse.
They found that accretion was clumpy and episodic in building a star. At one point, the amount of material landing on the star changed by a factor of five over the course of a few days. “The accretion process changes from night to night,” said Dupree. “Things are happening all the time.”
Some of the infalling material is pushed away in a stellar wind much like the solar wind that fills our solar system. Some gets channeled into giant loops and stellar prominences.
Astronomers have known that young stars are much more magnetically active than our middle-aged Sun, but now they can actually probe the interplay between the star’s magnetic fields and the protoplanetary disk.
“The very process of accretion is driving magnetic activity on TW Hydrae,” said Brickhouse.
