Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have captured the most detailed image yet of the young stellar object 244-440 and the bipolar jet associated with the object.
This image, captured by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), shows the young stellar object 244-440 in the Orion Nebula. Image credit: Kirwan et al. / ESO.
The young stellar object (YSO) 244-440 is located 1,306 light-years away in the constellation of Orion.
Also known as V* V2423 Ori and HH 524, the object is a so-called proplyd, an externally illuminated protoplanetary disk around a young star.
YSO 244-440 is a member of the Orion Nebula Cluster, a very young open cluster within the famous Orion Nebula.
The object is approximately 1,400 AU (astronomical units) across, making it one of the largest proplyds in the cluster.
“That wiggly magenta structure is a jet of matter launched close to the young star, but why does it have that shape?” said Maynooth University astronomer Andrew Kirwan and his colleagues.
“Very young stars are often surrounded by disks of material falling towards the star.”
“Some of this material can be expelled into powerful jets perpendicularly to the disk.”
“The S-shaped jet of YSO 244-440 suggests that what lurks at the center of this object isn’t one but two stars orbiting each other,” they added.
“This orbital motion periodically changes the orientation of the jet, similar to a water sprinkler.”
“Another possibility is that the strong radiation from the other stars in the Orion cloud could be altering the shape of the jet.”
The new image of YSO 244-440 was taken with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.
“Red, green and blue colors show the distribution of iron, nitrogen and oxygen respectively,” the astronomers said.
“But this is just a small fraction of all the data gathered by MUSE, which actually takes thousands of images at different colors or wavelengths simultaneously.”
“This allows us to study not only the distribution of many different chemical elements but also how they move.”
“Moreover, MUSE is installed at the VLT’s Unit Telescope 4, which is equipped with an advanced adaptive optics facility that corrects atmospheric turbulence, delivering images sharper than Hubble’s.”
“These new observations will therefore allow us to study with unprecedented detail how stars are born in massive clouds like Orion.”
The team’s findings will be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
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A. Kirwan et al. 2023. A spectacular jet from the bright 244-440 Orion proplyd: the MUSE NFM view. A&A, in press; doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/202245428
