THERE’S a nursery out there, and the babies are crying. NASA’s Chandra X-ray
Observatory picked up some ear-splitting cries from infant stars in a part of
the sky called Rho Ophiuchi. Some of the baby stars observed by
Yohko Tsuboi and her team at Pennsylvania State University generate X-ray flares
tens of thousands of times as energetic as flares from our own Sun.
“It’s very puzzling how these stars could show so much activity at such a
young age,” says Andrea Dupree of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics. These stars are less than a hundred thousand years old, equivalent
to…
