Dramatic New Image of a Star's Birth Reveals New Insight into Star Formation

A new image taken by the European Southern Observatory's ALMA telescope of a newborn star reveals a violent beginning in which jets of ejected material stream forth from the young star at velocities much higher than previously measured, indicating the outflowing gas carries with it far more energy than previously believed.

The picture portrays a formation known as a Herbig-Haro object, in which the ejected material crashes into surrounding gas, causing it to glow. Located some 1,400 light-years from Earth, this particular formation -- named Herbig-Haro 46/47 -- is situated in the southern constellation of Vela and was the subject of a study using ALMA while it was still under construction.

Even still, the observations that make up the image were gathered in just five hours, or a tenth of the time that would have been required by any other telescope making a similar observation.

"The detail in the Herbig-Haro 46/47 is stunning," Stuartt Corder of the Joint ALMA Observatory and a co-author on the new paper, said in a statement. "Perhaps more stunning is the fact that, for these types of observations, we really are still in the early days. In the future ALMA will provide even better images than this in a fraction of the time."

According to Diego Mardones of the Universidad de Chile, who also served as a co-author, the system is similar to the births of many other isolated, low mass stars and births, but "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."

And this, he explains, "makes it an excellent system for studying the impact of the stellar winds on the parent cloud from which the young star is formed."