Astronomers discover parallel disks and jets bursting from a pair of young stars

Most of the universe is invisible to the human eye. The building blocks of stars are only detected at wavelengths that are outside the visible spectrum. Astronomers recently used two very different and very powerful telescopes to detect twin disks – and twin parallel jets – that erupted from young stars in a multiple star system.

This discovery was unexpected and unprecedented, given the age, size and chemical composition of stars, disks and jets. Their location in a well-known and well-studied part of the universe adds to the excitement.

Observations from the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s (NRAO) Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter (ALMA) and NASA’s James Webb Mid-Infrared Instrument (JWST) were combined for this research.

JWST’s ALMA and MIRI observe very different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Using them together allowed astronomers to detect these twins, hidden in radio and infrared wavelengths in the WL20 star system, located in the rho Ophiuchi molecular cloud complex, over 400 light-years away from Earth’s solar system.

“What we discovered was absolutely wild,” says astronomer Mary Barsony, “We’ve known about the WL20 star system for a long time. But what caught our attention is that one of the stars in the system appeared much younger than the Using MIRI and ALMA together, we actually saw that this ONE star was two stars right next to each other, and each of these stars was surrounded by a disk, and each disk emitted jets parallel to the other.

ALMA spotted the discs, while MIRI found the jets. Co-author Valentin JM Le Gouellec of NASA-ARC took and reduced ALMA archival data to reveal the composition of the disks, while Lukasz Tychoniec of the Leiden Observatory provided high-resolution images, revealing massive disks roughly 100 times the distance between the Earth. and the sun. Another co-author, Martijn L. van Gelder, provided resources to process the data collected by MIRI, revealing the chemical composition of the aircraft.

Barsony adds, “So if it wasn’t for MIRI, we wouldn’t even know these planes existed, which is amazing.”

ALMA’s high-resolution observations of the disks surrounding the two newly observed stars revealed the structure of the disks, as Barsony explains, “Someone looking at this ALMA data not knowing there were twin jets would think, oh, it’s a large rim on the disc with a central hole, instead of two rims on the discs and two planes, this is quite remarkable.

Another wonderful thing about this discovery is that it may never have had the chance to happen. JPL scientist Michael Ressler explains, “Much of the research on binary protostars focuses on a few nearby star-forming regions. I was given my own observing time with JWST and chose to break it up into several small projects.

“For one project, I decided to study binaries in the Perseus star-forming region. However, I had been studying WL20, which is in the rho Ophiuchus region in almost the opposite part of the sky, for nearly 30 years, and I thought, ‘Why don’t hide it, I’ll never get another chance, even if it doesn’t fit the others.” We had a very lucky accident with what we found and the results are amazing.”

Combining multi-wavelength data from ALMA and JWST, these new findings shed light on the complex processes involved in the formation of multiple star systems. Astronomers plan to use ALMA’s future enhanced capabilities, such as the Broadband Sensitivity Enhancement, to continue unraveling the mysteries surrounding the birth of stars and planetary systems.