Astronomers have mapped only the second molecular outflow of its kind.
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00:00This is what's called a molecular outflow. It can occur in nebulas dense with hydrogen where stars
00:08form sending gas and other material flying out into massive cosmic clouds and it's incredibly
00:13rare for them to ever be mapped. In fact the first clearly documented one ever was found in 1980 in
00:18the Orion Nebula and the second was only recently caught by the Atacama Large Millimeter Submillimeter
00:23Array or ALMA. This is W28A2. It's what's known as a massive stellar nursery where new massive
00:29stars form. Astronomers believed this would be a likely area to catch one of these molecular
00:34outflows as smaller stellar explosions are always bipolar shooting off in only two directions whereas
00:39the previous molecular outflow seen in Orion exploded in many directions. And sure enough when they
00:44pointed ALMA that way they found an ultra dense hydrogen cloud with a massive molecular outflow
00:49with 34 of these streamers coming directly from a single point within the cloud. What's more they
00:54calculated the speed of the outflow to be traveling 80 miles per second and the explosion started about
00:59a thousand years ago. These outflows are much weaker than when a star goes supernova and we don't
01:03really know why they happen but they could be key in star formation and just like the Orion
01:07molecular outflow there was yet again no star at the center of this stellar explosion.