How the dance of death stars puts a new spin on the way suns are born

Some stars nearing the end of their lives slow their spin in a “retirement solo” that not only shows the end is nigh but also how others are born.

Chinese astronomers have used this cosmic dance to look into the Milky Way’s past and find that stars born today spin much faster than those formed billions of years ago.

Using data from Europe’s Gaia space telescope and other sky surveys, researchers at the Changchun Observatory in northeastern China studied thousands of stars, each with a mass roughly 1½ times that of the sun.

They found that as the Milky Way evolved, newly formed stars began spinning up to 10 times faster than their much older counterparts. That extra spin causes gas clouds to break into smaller fragments, making it harder for massive stars to take shape.

The study, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, presents the first direct evidence that the galaxy’s star-forming clouds have grown more turbulent over time.

“Our study shows that the angular momentum of stars in a certain mass range holds key clues to the Milky Way’s history,” the team said in a statement on the observatory’s website. “It offers a new way to study how the galaxy has changed over time.”

South China Morning Post