Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have observed a remarkable stellar phenomenon for the first time ever: a group of baby stars, painting the walls of their nursery with seemingly coordinated jets of high-speed gas. Intriguingly, all these jets point in the same direction. This messy discovery provides the first direct image of a long-studied phenomenon called protostellar outflows – massive jets of gas released by newborn stars. These outflows collide with and energize the material within the molecular gas clouds surrounding them. However, the discovery also presents a perplexing new mystery: why do many of these newly discovered jets appear to be aligned in the exact same direction, despite originating from widely separated stars?
The observations, detailed in a recent study published in the journal Nature, could unveil critical new information about how stars form and evolve. “Astronomers have long assumed that as clouds collapse to form stars, the stars will tend to spin in the same direction,” stated the principal investigator of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, in a press release. “However, this has not been seen so directly before. These aligned, elongated structures are a historical record of the fundamental way that stars are born.”
The newly imaged baby stars share a nursery in the Serpens Main – a vast and winding cloud of star-forming gas located in the Serpens constellation, roughly 1,300 light-years from Earth, according to NASA. Astronomers observed the nebula using JWST’s powerful Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), focusing on the hot, ionized trails of gas pushing through the star-forming cloud. The observations revealed at least 20 newborn stars in the region actively emitting protostellar outflows. One group of 12 stars (visible in the upper left corner of the JWST image) captivated the team’s attention. The jets blazing from these stars were all oriented in almost the exact same direction, “like sleet pouring down during a storm,” according to the NASA statement. The team estimated that the outflows are relatively young, originating between 200 to 1,400 years ago.
Such perfectly aligned outflows have never been witnessed before and are highly unlikely to be the result of random chance. According to the researchers, it’s likely that the group of 12 jet-spouting stars formed around the same time, along the same dense filament of gas. A powerful magnetic field defines the boundaries of this star-forming filament and may also be responsible for directing the angle of the protostellar jets seen emanating from it. Over time, this effect weakens as interactions with other objects slightly alter the spin axes of individual stars, redirecting the jets. This drift over time could explain why astronomers have never observed such perfect alignments before.
Further investigation of these coordinated outflows could unveil new details about how stars are born. Next, researchers plan to study Serpens Main with JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument to gain a deeper understanding of the chemical composition of the vast star nursery – which could reveal how solar systems like our own transfer elements from stars to young planets.
