A misaligned protostellar disk fed by gas streamers in a barred spiral-like massive dense core
Abstract
High-mass stars, born in massive dense cores (MDCs), profoundly impact the cosmic ecosystem through feedback processes and metal enrichment, yet little is known about how MDCs assemble and transfer mass across scales to form high-mass young stellar objects (HMYSOs). Using multi-scale (40-2500 au) observations of an MDC hosting an HMYSO, we identify a coherent dynamical structure analogous to barred spiral galaxies: three 20,000 au spiral arms feed a 7,500 au central bar, which channels gas to a 2,000 au pseudodisk. Further accretion proceeds through the inner structures, including a Keplerian disk and an inner disk (100 au), which are thought to be driving a collimated bipolar outflow. This is the first time that these multi-scale structures (spiral arms, bar, streamers, envelope, disk, and outflow) have been simultaneously observed as a physically coherent structure within an MDC. Our discovery suggests that well-organized hierarchical structures play a crucial role during the gas accretion and angular momentum build-up of a massive disk.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.15527,
title = {A misaligned protostellar disk fed by gas streamers in a barred spiral-like massive dense core},
author = {Xiaofeng Mai and Tie Liu and Xunchuan Liu and Bo Zhang and Paul F. Goldsmith and Neal J. Evans and Qizhou Zhang and Kee-Tae Kim and Dongting Yang and Mika Juvela and Fengwei Xu and Wenyu Jiao and Hongli Liu and Patricio Sanhueza and Guido Garay and Xi Chen and Shengli Qin and Jakobus M. Vorster and Anandmayee Tej and Zhiyuan Ren and Sami Dib and Shanghuo Li and Qiuyi Luo and Jihye Hwang and Prasanta Gorai and Ariful Hoque and Yichen Zhang and Jeong-Eun Lee and Siju Zhang and Emma Mannfors and Devika Tharakkal and Lokesh Dewangan and Leonardo Bronfman and Pablo Garcia and Xindi Tang and Swagat R. Das and Gang Wu and Chang-Won Lee and James O. Chibueze and Yankun Zhang and Qilao Gu and Kenichi Tatematsu and Guangli Wang and Lei Zhu and Zhiqiang Shen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.15527},
year = {2025}
}