Andrew is a freelance space journalist with a focus on reporting on China's rapidly growing space sector. He began writing for Space.com in 2019 and writes for SpaceNews, IEEE Spectrum, National Geographic, Sky & Telescope, New Scientist and others. Andrew first caught the space bug when, as a youngster, he saw Voyager images of other worlds in our solar system for the first time. Away from space, Andrew enjoys trail running in the forests of Finland. You can follow him on Twitter @AJ_FI.
"The simulations show that massive, bright, young stars can be ejected from the cluster through gravitational interactions with other stars," Yoshito Shimajiri, a research team member at the NAOJ, which operates ATERUI II, said in the statement.
And when these massive stars are kicked out of their nursery cluster, they can punch through dense molecular cloud, only partially ionizing the gas and allowing star formation to continue. The star's own fate depends on just how big a kick it experienced. "Some of these ejected stars run away, never to return," added Kohei Hattori, another NAOJ researcher who performed part of the analysis."In other cases, like what is observed in the Orion Nebula, a massive star can be thrown a distance from the cluster, where it initiates an ionized bubble, and then fall back into the cluster."
The researchers propose that for the Orion Nebula, the bubble-blowing ejection likely occurred about 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.