{"id":577455,"date":"2026-08-07T10:32:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T10:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/577455\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T10:32:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T10:32:09","slug":"astronomers-discover-a-giant-cosmic-river-feeding-gw-orionis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/577455\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers Discover a Giant Cosmic River Feeding GW Orionis"},"content":{"rendered":"

GW Orionis, a triple-star system boasting bizarre rings of dust misaligned with their orbits high in the constellation Orion<\/a>, has captivated astronomers for years. Rather than lying in the same flat plane, like hula hoops<\/a> tipped in different directions.<\/p>\n

Astronomers have long puzzled over this strange geometry. Was it simply the gravitational tug-of-war between three stars? Or was something else at play?<\/p>\n

A new study led by Maria Galloway-Sprietsma, a doctoral student at the University of Florida, offers a striking answer. Using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter\/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, her team spotted a stream of gas flowing<\/a> into the system.<\/p>\n

The gas contained specifically 12CO and 13CO isotopologues. Multipoint observations showed the streamer stretching nearly 30 arcseconds across the sky, or about 12,000 astronomical units.<\/p>\n

By measuring the gas, they estimated a mass of 1.6 Jupiter masses and calculated that it\u2019s falling into the disk at a rate of 3.6 \u00d7 10\u207b\u2078 solar masses per year. That\u2019s slower than the stars\u2019 own accretion rate, suggesting we\u2019re witnessing the final stages of infall.<\/p>\n

This incoming river of material, they argue, gradually tilted the outer ring while leaving the inner one mostly unchanged. The result: misaligned rings that could one day form planets with tilted orbits.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf these streamers are common, then we can naturally explain why planets may not necessarily end up in very orderly systems. They can have much more random orientations,\u201d said Jaehan Bae, Ph.D., professor of astronomy at the University of Florida.<\/p>\n

Our own solar system is tidy: all eight planets orbit the Sun in roughly the same plane. However, astronomers have detected a number of planetary systems throughout the galaxy containing worlds that take very unusual orbits. Rather than through chaos, this can happen quietly over time, and GW Orionis demonstrates how gas streams slowly bulge outward.<\/p>\n

\"OrionIRAS 100 \u03bcm image of the Orion star-forming-region (M.-A. Miville-Desch\u00eanes & G. Lagache 2005) with the location of GW Ori marked in red. A zoomed-in view of the region around GW Ori is shown in the lower right corner. Credit: DOI 10.3847\/1538-3881\/ae8bae<\/p>\n

The team\u2019s models showed that the streamer\u2019s path intersected with the disk at its furthest dust ring. The angular momentum is strongly aligned with that ring (within ~3\u00b0) but almost exactly misaligned by 32\u00b0 with the innermost ring.<\/p>\n

This mismatch strongly suggests the streamer is the driver of GW Ori\u2019s tilted disk structure. If planets form in these rings, their orbits will inherit the same skewed geometry.<\/p>\n

The team, which included collaborators from Germany\u2019s Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy, Ireland\u2019s University of Galway, and Queen Mary University of London, published their findings on August 6 in The Astronomical Journal.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we need next is a systematic survey of young stars to see how many have streamers and how many don\u2019t. That will tell us how important they are in shaping planetary systems,\u201d noted<\/a> Maria Galloway-Sprietsma, a doctoral student in Bae\u2019s group.<\/p>\n

Among the analyses made by ALMA was that of Total Power, whose results showed bright emission linking back to this streamer in a dense star-forming region. The distance also places GW Ori within the system\u2019s Bondi\u2013Hoyle radius<\/a>, so it remains gravitationally bound to its cloud parent. As the stars moved through their natal environment, it is likely that accretion from Bondi\u2013Hoyle was responsible for the formation of bonkers.<\/p>\n

The collective results suggest that GW Ori is not a runaway but rather still bound to its cosmic birthplace. The streamer is still pumping material into the disk, tilting its rings and preparing a planet that could orbit at an odd angle.<\/p>\n

Journal Reference:<\/p>\n

Maria Galloway-Sprietsma, Jaehan Bae, Toni Phillips, Jane Huang, Myriam Benisty, Matthew Porter, Christian Ginski, and Andrew Winter. A Streamer Driving Misalignment in the Circumtriple Disk of GW Ori. The Astronomical Journal. DOI: 10.3847\/1538-3881\/ae8bae<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"GW Orionis, a triple-star system boasting bizarre rings of dust misaligned with their orbits high in the constellation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":577456,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[85,46,141,7813],"class_list":["post-577455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science","tag-stars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=577455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577455\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/577456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=577455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=577455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=577455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}