Young stars sometimes emit jets of ionized gas, beautiful streamers of material, sometimes serpentine, sometimes knotted. Complexity creates them.
Young stars go through a lot as they’re being born. They sometimes emit jets of ionized gas called MHOs—Molecular Hydrogen emission-line Objects. New images of two of these MHOs, also called stellar jets, show how complex they can be and what a hard time astronomers have as they try to understand them.
” The journal Astronomy and Astrophysics will publish the paper, and it’s currently available at the pre-press site arxiv.org. The lead author is L.V. Ferrero from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in Argentina. The sinuous young stellar jet, MHO 2147, meanders lazily across a field of stars in this image captured from Chile by the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. The stellar jet is the outflow from a young star embedded in an infrared dark cloud. Astronomers suspect the gravitational attraction of companion stars causes its sidewinding appearance. The Gemini South telescope’s adaptive optics system captured these crystal-clear observations.
This image shows how complex groups of stellar jets can be. It’s a composite image of MHO 2147 obtained with GSAOI/GEMINI. MHO 2147 is more continuous than the other MHO in this study, the knotted MHO 1502, but it still has some knots. The white arrows mark the position of the different knots associated with MHO 2147. MHO 2148 is from a separate source than MHO 2147 and might come from a companion star. Another adjacent jet in the region designated Ad-jet isn’t part of the same structure.
The international Gemini Observatory captured this image of the knotted young stellar jet MHO 1502. The stellar jet is embedded in an area of star formation known as an HII region. A chain of knots makes up this bipolar jet, suggesting that the binary star responsible for it emits material intermittently. The Gemini South telescope captured these crystal clear images using its adaptive optics system, which helps astronomers counteract the blurring effects of atmospheric turbulence.
This image from the study shows IRAC 18064, which is MHO 1502’s source. The source could be a single intermediate-mass star, a pair of stars about 240 AU apart, or even a multi-star system. Image Credit: Ferrero et al. 2021