Star 5-edge-colorings of subcubic multigraphs

The star chromatic index of a mulitigraph $G$, denoted ${\chi }_s^{\prime }\left(G\right)$, is the minimum number of colors needed to properly color the edges of $G$ such that no path or cycle of length four is bi-colored. A multigraph $G$ is star$k$-edge-colorable if ${\chi }_s^{\prime }\left(G\right)\le k$. Dvo?ák et al. (2013) proved that every subcubic multigraph is star 7-edge-colorable, and conjectured that every subcubic multigraph should be star 6-edge-colorable. Kerdjoudj, Kostochka and Raspaud considered the list version of this problem for simple graphs and proved that every subcubic graph with maximum average degree less than $7∕3$ is star list-5-edge-colorable. It is known that a graph with maximum average degree $14∕5$ is not necessarily star 5-edge-colorable. In this paper, we prove that every subcubic multigraph with maximum average degree less than $12∕5$ is star 5-edge-colorable.