Understanding the Birth of Stars in the Orion Nebula

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

This astronomy project aims at understanding how stars are formed. Most stars, especially large ones but also stars like the Sun, form in clusters of thousands of objects. One of the best-known clusters of young stars is found in the Orion Nebula. This birthplace for stars can be viewed even with small telescopes. With large professional telescopes researchers can distinguish the thousands of stars in the cluster, most of which are only a few million years old. The team from the University of California San Diego will study the Orion cluster in greater detail than ever before. They will measure the movements of the stars using the Keck Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). By comparing the motions of the stars in Orion with computer models, the awardees will reach a better understanding of how the stars were formed. While conducting this research, the team will also develop a new, one day, hands-on workshop for the Better Education for Women in Science and Engineering (BE WiSE) program. BE WiSE works directly with 7-12th grade girls and hopes to encourage more of them to follow careers in the sciences. The awardees seek to test models of clustered star formation. They will focus on the Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC), probing stars with masses spanning three orders of magnitude down to the brown dwarf limit. The team propose to build a three-dimensional kinematic map of the center of the ONC by combining precise proper motion measurements from HST and Keck images with spatially-resolved radial velocity measurements from Keck spectroscopic observations. The ONC is the nearest site of massive star formation and provides a unique opportunity to study in detail how young pre-main-sequence stars and clusters form and evolve. Depending on the physical processes included in the model (e.g., turbulence, feedback, magnetic fields, etc.) current theories of star/cluster formation yield very different predictions for the internal dynamics and sub-structure within the cluster. Thus, kinematic studies of the ONC are a powerful tool for distinguishing between the models and will provide important constraints on star formation in general. A graduate student at UC San Diego will be heavily involved in this project.