What an 'Oddball' Star in the Cygnus Cluster Can Teach Us About How Masers are Made

upstart writes:

MWC 349A is 30 times bigger than our own sun and one of the brightest radio sources in the sky:

Like going to the store to buy dog food and coming back with a duck, researchers with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory may have uncovered a significant insight into how masers (nature's lasers) are formed while conducting a routine study of the "oddball" star MWC 349A using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). It came in the form of a previously unseen jet of ejected material being launched away from the star at "impossibly high speeds," according to the NRAO.

MWC 349A, which resides 3,900 light years away from us in the Cygnus constellation, earned its oddball moniker by being 30 times larger than our own star as well as one of the brightest radio sources in the sky. It's also one of the only observed celestial objects that's known to have a hydrogen maser. Those are as cool as they sound, being radio wavelength analogs to lasers that emit powerful, narrow beams of radiation instead of coherent light. Naturally occurring masers are valuable research tools as they amplify radio wave emissions which enables researchers to study processes that are too far or obscured to observe visually - think star-sized bullhorns in space.

[...] "Our previous understanding of MWC 349A was that the star was surrounded by a rotating disk and photo-evaporating wind," Prasad continued. "Strong evidence for an additional collimated jet had not yet been seen in this system." But that is what they stumbled upon this time around.

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