At left, a mid-infrared image of the Rho Ophiuchi molecular cloud complex taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, with the focus pointing toward the WL20 star system. On the right, WL20 expands to reveal an artist’s impression of this new discovery. Astronomers couldn’t believe their luck when multi-wavelength radio and infrared observations from ALMA and JWST revealed twin disks and erupting jets from a pair of young binary stars in WL20. Credit: US NSF/NSF NRAO/B. Saxton.; NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA
× close
At left, a mid-infrared image of the Rho Ophiuchi molecular cloud complex taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, with the focus pointing toward the WL20 star system. On the right, WL20 expands to reveal an artist’s impression of this new discovery. Astronomers couldn’t believe their luck when multi-wavelength radio and infrared observations from ALMA and JWST revealed twin disks and erupting jets from a pair of young binary stars in WL20. Credit: US NSF/NSF NRAO/B. Saxton.; NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA
Most of the universe is invisible to the human eye. The building blocks of stars are only revealed in wavelengths outside the visible spectrum. Astronomers recently used two very different and very powerful telescopes to discover twin disks (and twin parallel jets) emerging from young stars in a multi-star system.
This discovery was unexpected and unprecedented, given the age, size and chemical composition of the stars, disks and jets. Their location in a known and well-studied part of the universe adds to the thrill.
Observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) of the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) of the James Webb Space Telescope NASA (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 discover these twins, hidden in the radio and infrared wavelengths of the WL20 star system, located in the nearby Rho Ophiuchi molecular cloud complex, more than 400 light-years 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 was that one of the stars in the system appeared much younger than the others. Using MIRI and ALMA together, we actually saw that ONE star was made up of TWO stars side by side. Each of these stars was surrounded by a disk, and each disk emitted jets parallel to the others.
These brightly colored shapes represent astronomical data collected by NRAO’s ALMA and NASA’s JWST telescopes. At left, a composite image overlaps the ALMA and JWST data revealing the parallel disks and jets emitted by the pair of binary stars in WL20. On the right, the distribution of separate ALMA data and JWST data representing various chemical compositions is shown. Credit: US NSF/ NSF NRAO/ ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/ NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ JWST/ B. Saxton.
× close
These brightly colored shapes represent astronomical data collected by NRAO’s ALMA and NASA’s JWST telescopes. At left, a composite image overlaps the ALMA and JWST data revealing the parallel disks and jets emitted by the pair of binary stars in WL20. On the right, the distribution of separate ALMA data and JWST data representing various chemical compositions is shown. Credit: US NSF/ NSF NRAO/ ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/ NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ JWST/ B. Saxton.
ALMA spotted the disks, while MIRI found the jets. Co-author Valentin JM Le Gouellec of NASA-ARC retrieved and reduced archival ALMA data to reveal the composition of the disks, while Lukasz Tychoniec of the Leiden Observatory provided high-resolution images, revealing the size massive disks, approximately 100 times the distance between 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 jets.
Barsony adds: “So without MIRI, we wouldn’t even know these planes exist, which is incredible.”
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 and not knowing that there were jets twins would think, oh, that’s a big edge on the disk with a central center. hole, instead of two edges on the discs and two jets, it’s quite remarkable.
Another remarkable thing about this discovery is that it may never have had a chance to happen. JPL scientist Michael Ressler explains: “Much of the research on binary protostars focuses on a few nearby star-forming regions. I had secured my own observation time with JWST and chose to divide it into a few small projects.
“For a project, I decided to study binaries in the star-forming region of Perseus. However, I was studying WL20, which is in the Rho Ophiuchus region, almost on the opposite side of the sky, for almost 30 years, and I thought, “Why not do it quietly? I’ll never get another chance, even if it doesn’t quite match the others. “We had a very happy accident with what we found, and the results are stunning.”
By 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 upgrade, to continue unraveling the mysteries surrounding the birth of stars and planetary systems.