Achoo! Baby star 'sneezes' tell astronomers a lot about their development

Light blue, nearly transparent, lines are seen almost tangled on the left side of the image. They go through the dark part of a horizontal disk on the screen. To the right of this disk there's a bit of glowing orange light.

Every new parent knows the cold anxiety that grips them when their baby sneezes for the first time. That's when a litany of possible issues and ailments probably begin to irrationally race through your mind. Researchers now know baby stars also "sneeze," but these infinitely more powerful post-natal sneezes launch gas, dust, and magnetic energy. In other words, they're more useful to the cosmos than stressful. 

These eruptions from so-called "protostars" are actually a vital part of stellar development, and can tell scientists a great deal about that stellar body's evolution and maybe even if it will one day be surrounded by planets. Imagine a baby sneezing and their parents knowing from this they will one day be an architect.

The stellar sneezes were discovered by a team of scientists from Kyushu University in Japan who used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study the disks of gas and dust that surround infant stars that collapse to birth planets. These disks are called "protostellar disks."