Spitzer and Alma Team Up to Create Detailed Story of the Birth of a Star

Astronomers have assembled a stunning image of the birth of a star known as HH 46/47, revealing new insights into the chaotic process.

The picture represents the combined observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the newly completed Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. Together, the telescopes' surveys portray twin supersonic jets exploding from the central star, blasting away surrounding gas.

"Young stars like our sun need to remove some of the gas collapsing in on them to become stable, and HH 46/47 is an excellent laboratory for studying this outflow process," Alberto Noriega-Crespo, a scientist at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology, said in a statement. "Thanks to Spitzer, the HH 46/47 outflow is considered one of the best examples of a jet being present with an expanding bubble-like structure."

HH, or Herbig-Haro, objects are created when jets from infant stars run up against nearby material. As this happens, bright nebulous regions are created. And while the processes at play are often cloaked by gas and dust, the team effort of the two telescopes allowed researchers to pierce the the thick cloud and get a front row seat on the action.

The resulting views depict twin supersonic jets rising off the central star, pushing the gas around it away and illuminating it into two lobes. On the right side, the jet is forced to dig its way through a mass of material, while the left side moves relatively freely through a much thinner cloud.

Based on the new observations, the researchers discovered the lobes are expanding at a faster rate than previously believed, affecting the overall turbulence in the gaseous cloud. This extra activity could in turn impact the ways in which future stars may form from the surrounding dust and gas.

Led by Hector Arce from Yale University, the observations and analysis were published in The Astrophysical Journal.