In a turbulent tangle of dust and gas, a newly formed star is spewing supersonic jets of material that extend thousands of times the distance from Earth to the Sun. This is the young HH 211, as captured by the JWST Infrared Imaging Camera and described in a study recently published in the journal Nature.
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Herbig-Haro objects , also known as “HHs,” are created when fast-moving matter ejected from protostars collides with surrounding dust and gas , producing impacts “kind of like a bullet piercing through the air,” says lead author Tom Ray , an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Dublin. These collisions excite the gas, releasing infrared light that JWST can observe.
In this image from the study, red represents hydrogen spinning and vibrating at a few thousand Kelvin, surrounded by green representing carbon monoxide and blue reflecting the light from the young star. The protostar is located in the rotating, dusty disk at the center of the image, where infrared radiation cannot escape due to the density of the dust and gas. Astrophysicists believe that the matter ejected by the jets slows the disk's rotation, allowing the star to grow.
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While older stars, like our sun, blast atoms, ions and molecules into space, HH 211 mainly blasts out molecular matter. Such a surprising difference could help astrophysicists understand more about how stars evolve from this critical stage of their development, Ray says.
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“ I can stare at this for a long time ,” says astrophysicist Chin-Fei Lee of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Taiwan . He had previously observed HH 211 using the ground-based ALMA telescope in Chile. ALMA observed molecular outflows, but it cannot detect any of the high- temperature ionized material ejected by the jets . JWST did, and produced images with much higher resolution. “ This looks impressive to me ,” says Lee, “ because we see the entire structure and the beautiful jet .”
Source: scientificamerican
