The Violent Birth of Stars | Rachael Ainsworth | Bluedot Festival 2019

This talk was given at Bluedot Festival 2019 (https://www.discoverthebluedot.com/home) in Mission Control on Sunday, 21 July 2019 at 17:00 (https://www.discoverthebluedot.com/profile/rachael-ainsworth:-the-violent-birth-of-stars).

Abstract: Stars like our Sun begin their lives in breathtaking fashion. They begin deeply embedded within natal envelopes of gas and dust from which they accrete. They drive spectacular bipolar jets which are believed to be launched via magnetic fields, enabling accretion to proceed through the removal of excess angular momentum. These jets exhibit shocks of many irregular morphologies along their lengths and terminate in bright bow shocks. As the massive envelopes are depleted due to accretion onto the disks and dispersion caused by the outflows, the young stars begin to become optically visible and eventually evolve into solar systems similar to our own. I will present observations of these newborn systems from next generation radio telescopes, which peer through the dust of these stellar nurseries to learn more about violent jet processes, and what we hope to learn from the Square Kilometre Array - a global science and engineering project to build the world’s largest radio telescope.