JWST shows surprising violence in a young star system’s birth – Big Think
Just 450 light-years away, new stars are being born.The Taurus Molecular Cloud has thousands of stellar masses worth of cold, collapsing gas.Inside the densest, most massive regions, newborn stars are already thriving.Many young stellar systems have protoplanetary disks: the birthplace of planets.Also, some young stars exhibit energetic outflows: Herbig-Haro objects.One such remarkable object happens to be oriented perfectly edge-on to us: Herbig-Haro 30 (HH30).HH30 has been imaged many times, including by the Hubble Space Telescope.However, many additional features can be seen by viewing HH30 in other, longer wavelengths of light.Near-infrared imaging, provided by JWST, reveals conical outflows alongside the two jets.Mid-infrared views, also from JWST, showcase high, wide columns of tiny-grained dust surrounding this object.Meanwhile, the longest-wavelength views come from ALMA, which probes the distribution of large, millimeter-sized dust grains.From combining all of this data, we can determine many remarkable facts.Small dust grains are fully mixed, vertically, while larger ones remain in a thin, confined disk.Cone-like outflows surround the centrally emitted, rapid, collimated jets.Roughly one Earth mass gets ejected every decade.Vitally, the narrow, dense dust layer within the disk enables the future formation of planets.Mostly Mute Monday tells an astronomical story in images, visuals, and no more than 200 words.
Source: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/jwst-violence-star-system-birth/
