Scientists watched the dramatic birth of a star, and found that its jets are "even more energetic than previously thought."
The findings also found an unknown jet pointing in a different direction from the rest, a European Southern Observatory (ESO) press release reported.
"ALMA has made it possible to detect features in the observed outflow much more clearly than previous studies. This shows that there will certainly be many surprises and fascinating discoveries to be made with the full array. ALMA will certainly revolutionize the field of star formation!" Team leader, Héctor Arce, of Yale University, said.
Astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to look at carbon monoxide molecules in an object named Herbig-Haro 46/47.
Herbig-Haro 46/47 is about 1,400 light-years away from Earth, and resides a the constellation called Vela (The Sails).
Baby stars can eject materials at a powerful rate of one million kilometers per hour; the colliding jets create a Herbig-Haro object.
The image revealed one jet was coming towards Earth, and the other was moving in the opposite direction. The latter jet was previously undetected, and may have been obscured by a celestial dust cloud.
The image's clarity allowed researchers to measure how fast the material was moving through space, they found it moved at much higher speed than they had previously believed.
"ALMA's exquisite sensitivity allows the detection of previously unseen features in this source, like this very fast outflow. It also seems to be a textbook example of a simple model where the molecular outflow is generated by a wide-angle wind from the young star," Arce said.
The image also revealed a secondary outflow from a "lower mass companion" of the main star. The outflow appears to be "carving hole" in the nearby celestial cloud.
"This system is similar to most isolated low mass stars during their formation and birth. 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," co-author Diego Mardones, of Universidad de Chile, said.
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