It gives us a new piece of the puzzle about how stars are formed. The baby stars observed by the researchers are about 1,500 light years away from Earth. Researchers observed stars as young as 10,000 years old, and others as old as 100,000. A mature star can be millions or billions of years old. But the X-ray activity is even stronger than we believed.
Scientists believe that stars form when gas clouds collapse due to gravity.
As the gas becomes more dense, the cloud heats up and radiates energy. Then the cloud begins to rotate, and dust builds up into a flat disc, or protostar, in the center of the cloud. Up until now, scientists had only been able to see the dense cloud around baby stars. Scientists proposed looking at the Orion constellation because of the sheer number of baby stars there. Chandra, the most sensitive X-ray telescope in use, has let scientists see the violent flares of hot plasma shoot away from the baby stars.