Serpens Nebula: A row of jets appears as red streaks in the upper left corner
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (NASA-JPL), Joel Green (STScI)
Astronomers have captured a star alignment: New images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) show jets emanating from a young star lining up in a straight line, finally proving a phenomenon that has long been suspected but never before been observed.
When a giant gas cloud collapses and begins to form stars, its rotation speeds up — similar to how an ice skater pulls their arms in toward their body to spin faster. This spinning causes a disk of dust and gas to form around the young star at the cloud’s center, providing material for the cloud itself.
Strong magnetic fields in the disk send jets of material along the star’s rotation axis, which can be used to measure the young star’s rotation direction. The JWST image of the Serpens Nebula, about 1,400 light-years away, shows 12 baby stellar clumps. All the jets are pointing in roughly the same direction..
“Astronomers have long assumed that when clouds collapse and stars form, the stars tend to rotate in the same direction,” he said. Klaus Pontoppidan At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California statement“But we’ve never seen it so directly before.”
The new observations suggest that these stars all inherit their rotation from the same long string of gas. Over time, this rotation may change as the stars interact with each other and other space objects. This is evident from the fact that another group of younger, possibly older, stars in the same image of the Ophiuchus Nebula do not have aligned jets.
topic:
- Performer/
- James Webb Space Telescope
