An expanding sphere of glowing gas has astronomers scratching their heads. Philip Diamond, University of Manchester Astronomers may have caught a young star blowing a bubble 1 . Some clever theoretician will have to come up with a way to explain it. Watching the skies over two months, Ho's team saw a perfectly spherical bubble gently expanding at 9 kilometres a second around what they think is a star.
Stars form when hot dust and gas spiral in to a central point, eventually clumping together.
A stable clump can't form unless the infant star sheds energy. Nascent stars lose energy by ejecting jets of matter from their poles. The VLBA can be used to observe features as small as a 'milliarcsecond' across. Being able to see that much detail using a telescope is unprecedented. American Astronomical Society astronomer Kevin Marvel agrees, but points out that the sphere is still complete mystery.