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The NACO archive contains data on 57 young stars. Twenty stars had known dust disks or substructures. Master's student Sam de Regt (Leiden University, Netherlands) discovered his two new images (lower left and lower center) of YLW 16A and area 2-21 while sorting through the archives.Credit: ESO/VLT/NACO, De Regt et al.
Sam de Legt, a master's student from Leiden, has been studying images of young stars from retired astronomical cameras for 16 years and found that two of these stars had never been seen before at this level of detail. We discovered that it was still shrouded in a birth cloud that had never been observed.He published his data cleaning methods and new images of his two stars in a magazine astronomy and astrophysics.
When Sam de Regt (Leiden University, Netherlands) attended a lecture by Matthew Kenworthy (Leiden University) and Christian Pinski (now University of Galway, Ireland), he thought it would be interesting to study the so-called PDI method for his master's thesis. Ta. . PDI stands for Polarimetric Differential Imaging.
This method allows astronomers to distinguish between the very bright unpolarized light from the star and the faint polarized light reflected from dust particles in the disk around the star. Planets can form in such dusty disks.
Ginsky and Kenworthy suggested that de Legt reanalyze archival images from the NACO instruments. The instrument was installed on his Very Large Telescope in Chile from 2003 to 2019 and contains data from 57 young stars.
After sorting through the images, de Lett found disks of dust surrounding 20 known stars. Surprisingly, the observations discovered that in addition to these 20 of his stars, two other of his stars, YLW 16A and Area 2-21, also contain dust structures. Ta. These protostars are about 360 light-years away toward the constellation Ophiuchus (known as the Star with the Serpent).
openly accessible
“I think it's really cool that we were able to create two new images of these star cocoons,” says De Regt. “Additionally, it is of course great that thanks to the standard procedures we have developed, the data is now reduced and openly accessible via the Zenodo archive.”
Thesis supervisor Matthew Kenworthy said: “This will enable other astronomers to use this data to conduct research and breathe new life into the data. This is a good example of open science principles. This is an example,” he added.
“It's amazing that Sam was able to accomplish this in just a few months,” said graduate supervisor Christian Ginsky. “I've never seen so much productivity.”
De Regt is currently a Ph.D. Student at Leiden University. He studies how the formation of exoplanets leaves traces in their atmospheres.
For more information:
S. de Regt et al., Polarimeter differential imaging using VLT/NACO. Comprehensive PDI Pipeline (PIPPIN) for NACO Data,astronomy and astrophysics (2024). www.aanda.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202348736
Magazine information:
astronomy and astrophysics