SOMETHING other than gravity is helping an embryonic star devour the gas around it, causing it to grow at a furious pace and emit X-rays well before it should.
The precocious star, which lies about 500 light years away in a group of 10 young stars, is a Class 0 protostar. A team led by Kenji Hamaguchi, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has detected X-ray emission from this object, the first to be seen from such a young protostar.
Studies using space-based X-ray telescopes suggest that the X-rays are being emitted as the surrounding…
