ALMA captures close-up of newborn star
Astronomers recently captured a close-up image of material jetting away from a newborn star.
Taken with the Atacama Large Millimenter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile, the image shows a glowing mass, called Herbig-Haro 46/47, that formed when the materials collided with gas and dust.
According to a press release from the European Southern Observatory, young stars eject materials at up to one million kilometers per hour. Herbig-Haro objects are named for the U.S. and Mexican astronomers who first studied them in detail.
Herbig-Haro 46/47 is 1,400 light years away in the constellation Vela. The two jets that are visible in the photo are moving in opposite directions, one towards Earth.
These are among the first images captured by ALMA, which was still under construction at the time of capture. ALMA is an internationally-funded effort with a price-tag of more than $1 billion.
In images captured previously, using other telescopes, the view of the second jet was obstructed by dust clouds surrounding the newborn star. The new images allowed astronomers to more accurately measure the velocity of the jets.
"This system is similar to most isolated low mass stars during their formation and birth," said Diego Mardones of the Universidad de Chile in a press release. "But it is also unusual because the outflow impacts the cloud directly on one side of the young star and escapes out of the cloud on the other. This makes it an excellent system for studying the impact of the stellar winds on the parent cloud from which the young star is formed."
