By Ron Cowen
Left to their own devices, young stars would twirl so fast that they’d fly apart. Astronomers have long suspected that the planet-forming disks of gas and dust that surround many newborn stars put the brakes on these whirling dervishes. Now, researchers have the first clear-cut evidence that the young stars’ rotations are indeed slowed by their disks.
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To investigate, Luisa Rebull of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and her colleagues used the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope to study about 500 young stars in a densely packed stellar nursery, the Orion nebula. The telescope can easily find disks because the dust within them absorbs visible light from their parent stars and reemits the radiation at infrared wavelengths.