Young star lights up the Milky Way with colossal jets

Today’s Image of the Day from the European Space Agency features an incredible phenomenon that was captured on the far outskirts of the Milky Way.

A young, massive star has announced its arrival with a dramatic display. It has fired off twin jets of gas so powerful they stretch across eight light-years – about twice the distance from our Sun to the Alpha Centauri system. 

These streams are confined to narrow beams by the star’s magnetic fields and launched along its spin axis. 

The jets of a young star

The James Webb Space Telescope captured the event in exquisite infrared detail, showing the jets carving their way through interstellar gas and dust.

The stellar outburst belongs to a rare class of cosmic displays known as Herbig-Haro objects. They form when material falling onto a newborn star is shot back out into space at incredible speeds. 

The star at the heart of this spectacle lies in a cluster about 15,000 light-years away. The star has a mass that is already ten times greater than the Sun’s. 

The outflow is hurtling through space at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, leaving behind a trail that astronomers can now study as a record of the star’s growth.

An unexpected discovery

The discovery took astronomers by surprise, including Yu Cheng of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). 

“We didn’t really know there was a massive star with this kind of super-jet out there before the observation. Such a spectacular outflow of molecular hydrogen from a massive star is rare in other regions of our galaxy,” said Cheng. 

More than 300 Herbig-Haro objects are known, but most of them come from stars much smaller than this one. Webb’s sharp images reveal not just the scale but also the delicate structure of this jet, including knots, shocks, and filaments where the stream slams into surrounding material.

“I was really surprised at the order, symmetry, and size of the jet when we first looked at it,” said Jonathan Tan of the University of Virginia.

The perfect alignment of the opposite streams suggests the process fueling this star’s growth has been steady for more than 100,000 years.

Mystery of massive star formation 

The new observation has reopened one of the longest-running debates in astronomy: how do massive stars form? For decades, scientists have been split between two main ideas. 

One theory suggests that stars this large form through a steady process called core accretion, where gas builds up in a stable disk and launches outflows in predictable directions. 

The other theory, known as competitive accretion, involves a chaotic tug-of-war in which streams of gas fall in from all sides, twisting the orientation of the jets.

The Webb data now tilt the balance toward the first explanation. The opposing jets are nearly 180 degrees apart, showing that the central disk has remained steady throughout the star’s lifetime. 

“What we’ve seen here, because we’ve got the whole history – a tapestry of the story – is that the opposite sides of the jets are nearly 180 degrees apart from each other. That tells us that this central disc is held steady and validates a prediction of the core accretion theory,” said Tan.

Conditions of the early universe 

The star’s home lies in a cluster called Sharpless 2-284, a relatively pristine region on the galaxy’s periphery. Because it is far from the Milky Way’s busy center, its stars formed in an environment low in heavy elements. 

Astronomers call this property metallicity, and it mirrors the conditions of the early universe, before multiple generations of stars had enriched space with the products of nuclear fusion.

“Webb’s exquisite data have also shown us that relatively more stars seem to form at lower masses in Sh2-284 than in closer, more metal-rich clusters. This cluster is an excellent region to help us understand star formation throughout the Universe,” said Morten Andersen of the European Southern Observatory.

Image Credit: ESA

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