The tale of the twisted field
Cox and fellow scientists stumbled upon the odd binary star siblings after following a hunch about a well-known star-forming cloud dubbed L483. Initially, looking at L483 wasn’t anything special. It was a standard stellar nursery, about 100 times the size of our solar system, that spits out stellar material with extreme vigor and helps give rise to tons of stars. It even had a magnetic field that seemed rather normal.
“At first, it matched what theory predicts,” Cox said. “But theory can say one thing, and observations can say another.” Sure enough, zooming into L483 told a wildly different tale.
After using NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, to take a closer look at L483, the team saw right off the bat that the magnetic field of this stellar nursery was not normal at all. Something strange was going on. Time to dig deeper.
Later, upon invoking a powerful radio telescope called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, or ALMA, the researchers revealed a finding arguably even more peculiar than the magnetic complication. Hiding right behind one of L483’s newborn stars…there was another baby orb.
“There is newer work that suggests it’s possible to have two stars form far away from each other, and then one star moves in closer to form a binary,” Cox said. “We think that’s what is happening here.” However, Cox added, “we don’t know why one star would move toward another one, but we think the moving star shifted the dynamics of the system to twist the magnetic field.”
Further observations unlocked a few other key findings about the binary star system, such as the fact they’re still really young from our perspective, they’re steadily forming and they’re about the same distance apart as our sun is to Pluto. Eventually, Cox said, “with new instruments coming online to discover and probe new binary systems, we will be able to test these results with a statistical sample.”