A new survey of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, combines the capabilities of the Very Large Array and the Effelsberg telescope in Germany to provide astronomers with valuable new insights into how stars much more massive than the Sun are formed.

Stars with more than about ten times the mass of our Sun are important components of the Galaxy and strongly affect their surroundings. However, understanding how these massive stars are formed has proved challenging for astronomers. In recent years, this problem has been tackled by studying the Milky Way at a variety of wavelengths, including radio and infrared. This new survey, called GLOSTAR (Global view of the Star formation in the Milky Way), was designed to take advantage of the vastly improved capabilities that an upgrade project completed in 2012 gave the VLA to produce previously unobtainable data.

GLOSTAR has excited astronomers with new data on the birth and death processes of massive stars, as well on the tenuous material between the stars. The GLOSTAR team of researchers has published a series of papers in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics reporting initial results of their work, including detailed studies of several individual objects. Observations continue and more results will be published later.

The survey detected telltale tracers of the early stages of massive star formation, including compact regions of hydrogen gas ionized by the powerful radiation from young stars, and radio emission from methanol (wood alcohol) molecules that can pinpoint the location of very young stars still deeply shrouded by the clouds of gas and dust in which they are forming.

The survey also found many new remnants of supernova explosions — the dramatic deaths of massive stars. Previous studies had found fewer than a third of the expected number of supernova remnants in the Milky Way. In the region it studied, GLOSTAR more than doubled the number found using the VLA data alone, with more expected to appear in the Effelsberg data.

«This is an important step to solve this longstanding mystery of the missing supernova remnants,» said Rohit Dokara, a Ph.D student at the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy (MPIfR) and lead author on a paper about the remnants.

Story Source: Materials provided by National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.