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 galaxy WL20. On the right, WL20 expands to reveal an artist’s impression of this new discovery. Astronomers couldn’t believe their luck when multi-wavelength observations from ALMA and JWST revealed twin disks and jets erupting from a pair of young binary stars in WL20. Credit: US NSF/NSF NRAO/B. Saxton.; NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA
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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 galaxy WL20. On the right, WL20 expands to reveal an artist’s impression of this new discovery. Astronomers couldn’t believe their luck when multi-wavelength observations from ALMA and JWST revealed twin disks and jets erupting 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 revealed only in wavelengths beyond the visible spectrum. Astronomers recently used two very different and very powerful telescopes to discover twin disks (and two parallel jets) erupting from young stars in a multiple 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, well-studied part of the universe adds to the suspense.
Observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were used for this study combined.
ALMA’s MIRI and JWST observe very different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Using them together, astronomers were able to discover these twins hidden in radio and infrared wavelengths in galaxy WL20, located in the nearby rho Ophiuchi molecular cloud complex, more than 400 light-years away from Earth’s solar system.
“What we discovered was absolutely wild,” says astronomer Mary Barsony. ‘We have known about galaxy WL20 for a long time. But what caught our attention is that one of the stars in the system seemed much younger than the rest. MIRI and ALMA together we saw that this ONE star was TWO stars right next to each other. Each of these stars was surrounded by a disk, and each disk radiated parallel to the other rays.
These brightly colored shapes represent astronomical data collected by NRAO’s ALMA and NASA’s JWST telescopes. On the left, a composite image overlays ALMA and JWST data, revealing the disks and parallel jets emanating from the pair of binary stars in WL20. Shown on the right is the breakdown of the individual ALMA data and JWST data representing different chemical compositions. Credit: US NSF/NSF NRAO/ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/NASA/JPL-Caltech/JWST/B. Saxton.
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These brightly colored shapes represent astronomical data collected by NRAO’s ALMA and NASA’s JWST telescopes. On the left, a composite image overlays ALMA and JWST data, revealing the disks and parallel jets emanating from the pair of binary stars in WL20. Shown on the right is the breakdown of the individual ALMA data and JWST data representing different chemical compositions. Credit: US NSF/NSF NRAO/ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/NASA/JPL-Caltech/JWST/B. Saxton.
ALMA saw the disks, while MIRI found the jets. Co-author Valentin JM Le Gouellec of NASA-ARC collected and downscaled ALMA archival data to reveal the composition of the disks, while Lukasz Tychoniec of Leiden Observatory provided high-resolution images, revealing the enormous size of the disks, approximately 100 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Another co-author, Martijn L. van Gelder, provided tools 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 jets existed, which is amazing.”
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 there are twin jets would think, oh, it’s a big rim on the disk with a central point. hole, instead of two edge discs and two jets. That’s quite remarkable.”
Another remarkable aspect of this discovery is that it may never have had a chance to happen. JPL scientist Michael Ressler explains: “Much research on binary protostars focuses on a few nearby star-forming regions. I had been given some observation time at JWST, and I chose to break it up into a few small projects.
‘For one project I decided to study double stars in the star-forming region of Perseus. However, I had been studying WL20 for almost thirty years, which is in the rho Ophiuchus region, almost on the other side of the sky, and I thought, ‘Why not sneak it in? I’ll never get another chance, even if it doesn’t quite fit in with the others.’ We had a very fortunate accident with what we found, and the results are amazing.”
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 Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade, to continue unraveling the mysteries surrounding the birth of stars and planetary systems.