A new source of flares found in stellar "embryos"

Astrophysicists from UrFU together with an international team discovered a unique source of cosmic flares near a supermassive protostar

Scientists from Ural Federal University, in collaboration with Chinese and Italian colleagues, have made a breakthrough in astrophysics, studying in detail for the first time the process of rearrangement of force lines in large magnetic fields near a stellar "embryo." This sensational discovery was reported by the publication "Izvestia."

The object of the study was the protostar G36.11+0.55, located at a colossal distance — more than four thousand light years from our planet.

"Scientists recorded an unusual microwave radiation flare (maser), which lasted 90 days and released energy of about 10³⁹ ergs", said Sergey Khaibrakhmanov, a researcher at the Laboratory of Astrochemical Research at UrFU.

According to the researcher, the scale of this cosmic phenomenon is mind-boggling: the energy release exceeded an average solar flare by approximately a million times. An even more impressive comparison — it's about 170 billion times greater than the annual energy consumption of all humanity. The most important scientific discovery was the detected synchronicity between changes in maser brightness and fluctuations in the magnetic field.

The astrophysicist noted that such phenomena are usually associated with the process of accretion — when a protostar increases its mass by absorbing surrounding matter. However, the brightness of the recorded flare, despite its colossal power, was lower than in other similar events. This led scientists to think about fundamentally different physics of the observed phenomenon. Researchers hypothesized that G36 experienced an episode of increased accretion, and the cause of the grand energy release was the transfer of the magnetic field from a clump of matter that fell onto the protostar.

Ural Federal University emphasized the significance of the discovery, which convincingly proves the participation of magnetic fields in the process of star formation and confirms their role as giant cosmic energy repositories.