A system of seven protostars embedded in an accretion disk was spotted in the high-mass star forming region NGC 6334IN. This is the first time such a high number of nascent stars is observed embedded in a disk, showing how the mechanism of disk fragmentation contributes to the multiplicity of massive stellar systems. In order to confirm disk fragmentation as the most likely mechanism to produce the observed distribution of protostars, the researchers compared the data against 3D radiation-gravito-hydrodynamical simulations of disk fragmentation. These simulations were studied by André Oliva (leader of Cinespa's Beiwa group) during his PhD studies under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Rolf Kuiper (now at the University of Duisburg-Essen). The image shows a superposition of the simulations and the observations.
Researchers from universities and research institutions in China, Germany, Costa Rica, United States, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Canada participated in this discovery, which was lead by Dr. Shanghuo Li, from Nanjing University.
Link to the scientific article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02682-9