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Music

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Narrator: Not far from the colorful nebula

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M78, in a dark cloud where stars are being formed, a young

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star announced its presence by lighting up a nebula never cataloged

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before. Astronomers first noticed McNeil's Nebula in

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2003, which drew their attention to the young star illuminating it,

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named V1647 Orionis. The star

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sports a pair on intense X-ray "hot spots" thousands of times

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hotter than the rest of the star. These spots are thought to be the footprints

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of streams that transfer gas from a disk that still surrounds the young

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star. Scientists think that magnetic reconnection events--

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the energy source for outbursts from our own sun--channel and drive

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the gas flows. The star, which spins once in about a day,

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rotates faster than the disk, and constantly winds up the

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magnetic fields, which release a great deal of energy when they snap back into

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lower-energy states. This protostar's X-ray

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variations are giving astronomers a rare glimpse of energetic phenomena

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accompanying the "toddler" phase of a low-mass star.