Young stars go through a lot. They emit jets of ionized gas. New images of two of these stellar jets show how complex they can be and how hard it is to understand them.
It isn't that rare to see jets from young stars. Young stars propel material out of their opposite sides. Young stars form when they are still growing. The jets are created by interactions between the star's magnetic fields and the material around it. Sometimes the jets are made up of knots of material and sometimes they are curved.
The paper looks at the environments of the two MHOs. The model that explains them was developed by the authors. They made progress but did not make any conclusions. Their work shows how complex they can be. They can be pleasing to the eye.
The paper will be published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. The lead author is from Argentina.
There are two systems of jets in this study. There is a pair of curved jets. The other is a pair of jets made of clumps of gas that are chained together.
The jets are about 10,000 light-years away in the Ophiuchus region. Astronomers think the source of the jets is a stellar source. The curved shape of the jets is created by interaction between the source and its environment. The jets are curved because they point in different directions over time. The jets change in direction due to the influence of nearby stars.
Astronomers discovered IRAS 17537 in 2011 and found it to be a young stellar object with about 12 solar mass. There was evidence for a second companion star. The authors think a triple star system could be to blame for the jet's curved appearance.
M HO 2147 is in a dark cloud. TheIDC is a dense region inside a cloud, and it is opaque at theIR. Astronomers don't know a lot aboutIDCs. Evidence shows they could be the earliest stages of star formation.
The jet named M HO 2148 is in the same region as the jet named M HO 2147. M HO 2148 is not the same as M HO 2147 and might be from a companion star.
The other jets are not in the same environment. The researchers think the jets are intermittent rather than continuous. The HII region made of ionized atomic hydrogen has a star named M HO 1502. A pair of stars might create the jets, according to the researchers.
M HO 1502 is in the middle of a cloud. Astronomers discovered it in 2007. Mho 1502's driving source could be a single intermediate-mass star, but it couldn't be ruled out as a multi-star system. The study doesn't reach any conclusions about the presence of a star.
The systems of jets and the sources that drive them are complex and interrelated, but some of the details are still unknown. Is there a single star in these systems? The authors think that the jets wouldn't show clumping or curving.
Astronomers might be able to understand the star-formation process and solar system evolution if they understand Jets like these. Only young stars form jets when they are growing. Learning more about the star-formation process would tell us more about young stars.
The jets were discovered a few years ago. The jets, the clouds, and the star-forming regions they reside in are probably connected in some way, but the study of these objects is still in its infancy. Astronomers have a lot of work to do, and there will be some exciting discoveries along the way.
The last word goes to the authors, who say that the similarity of M HO 2147, the Ad and the M HO 2148 jet to other previously reported jets suggests the existence of a small but interesting group of adjacent and parallel jets. High-angular-resolution and sensitive multi-wavelength data are needed to shed light on the physical relation of M HO 2147, Ad, and M HO 2148.
