English

Massive extended streamers feed high-mass young stars

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2025-08-25 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

Stars are born in a variety of environments that determine how they gather gas to achieve their final masses. It is generally believed that disks are ubiquitous around protostars as a result of angular momentum conservation and are natural places to grow planets. As such, they are proposed to be the last link in the inflow chain from the molecular cloud to the star. However, disks are not the only form that inflows can take. Here we report on high-resolution observations performed with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array that reveal inflows in the form of streamers. These streamers persist well within the expected disk radius, indicating that they play a substitute role channeling material from the envelope directly to an unresolved small disk or even directly to the forming high-mass protostar. These flows are massive enough to feed the central unresolved region at a rate sufficient to quench the feedback effects of the young massive star.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.15889,
  title  = {Massive extended streamers feed high-mass young stars},
  author = {Fernando A. Olguin and Patricio Sanhueza and Adam Ginsburg and Huei-Ru Vivien Chen and Kei E. I. Tanaka and Xing Lu and Kaho Morii and Fumitaka Nakamura and Shanghuo Li and Yu Cheng and Qizhou Zhang and Qiuyi Luo and Yoko Oya and Takeshi Sakai and Masao Saito and Andrés E. Guzmán},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.15889},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Published in Science Advances and available at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adw4512