THERE'S a nursery out there, and the babies are crying. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory picked up some ear-splitting cries from infant stars in a part of the sky called Rho Ophiuchi. Some of the baby stars observed by Yohko Tsuboi and her team at Pennsylvania State University generate X-ray flares tens of thousands of times as energetic as flares from our own Sun.
"It's very puzzling how these stars could show so much activity at such a young age," says Andrea Dupree of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. These stars are less than a hundred thousand years old, equivalent to one week in a human lifespan, and nuclear fusion hasn't started in their cores. So why all the noise?
Norbert Schulz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says the stars' rapid rotation and strong magnetic fields may be responsible, though the details have still to be worked out. "There are ...
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