For more than four hundred years, astronomers have used telescopes to study the great variety
of stars in our galaxy. Millions of distant suns have been catalogued.
There are dwarf stars, giant stars, dead stars, exploding stars, binary stars; by now, you might
suppose that every kind of star in the Milky Way had been seen.
That's why a recent discovery is so surprising. Researchers using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii
have found a star with spiral arms.
The name of the star is SAO 206462. It's a young star more than four hundred light years from
Earth in the constellation Lupus, the wolf.
SAO 206462 attracted attention because it has a circumstellar disk--that is, a broad disk of dust and
gas surrounding the star. Researchers strongly suspected that new planets might be coalescing inside
the disk, which is about twice as wide as the orbit of Pluto.
When they took a closer look at SAO 206462 they found not planets, but arms. Astronomers
have seen spiral arms before: they're commonly found in pinwheel galaxies where hundreds of
millions of stars spiral together around a common core. Finding a clear case of spiral arms around an
individual star, however, is unprecedented. read more here......
http://www.clarksvilleonline.com/2011/11/02/a-star-with-spiral-arms/
