Astronomers have detected a hitherto unseen jet of matter being ejected from a distant, “eccentric” star at an astounding speed of more than a million miles per hour. The high-velocity jet is thought to be driven by the unusual star’s magnetic forces.
The team made the discovery while studying scans, naturally occurring amplified microwave radio emissions, around the massive star designated MWC 349A with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Millimeter Array (Alma). The findings could help scientists better understand how massive stars evolve.
MWC 349A is located about 4,000 light-years from Earth constellation Cygnus Not only is it one of the brightest radio sources in the sky but it’s also one of the few objects known to be surrounded by hydrogen masers.
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Due to its unique features, MWC 349A which has approximately 30 times the mass the sun, has become the subject of intense study at optical, infrared and radio wavelengths. However, nothing like this jet had been seen emerging from the star before.
“Our previous understanding of MWC 349A was that the star was surrounded by a rotating disk and photo-evaporating winds. Strong evidence of an additional parallel jet has not yet been seen in this system,” said the lead author and a university research assistant in the paper. Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian (CfA) (Opens in a new tab)Serena Prasad said.
The discovery was made in part because the measuring instruments make it easier to study processes that are too small to see, allowing Prasad and the team to uncover previously unseen structures in the star’s immediate environment.
“Mazer is like a naturally occurring laser,” Prasad said. “It’s a region in outer space that’s emitting a really bright kind of light. We can see that light and trace it back to where it came from, which brings us one step closer to figuring out what’s really going on.”
In addition to spotting this high-speed jet, the scanning instrument study also allowed the team to map out the surrounding disk of MWC 349A in detail for the first time.
“We used hydrogen-generated lasers to investigate the physical and dynamical structures in the gas surrounding MWC 349A and revealed a flat disk of gas with a diameter of 50 AU. [1 AU is approximately 93 million miles the distance between the sun and the Earth] approximately the size of the solar system, confirming the star’s near-horizontal disk structure,” said the project’s principal investigator and CfA senior astrophysicist Qizhou Zhang. We also found a fast-moving jet component hidden within the winds flowing away from a star.”
The stream of material shoots away from the star so fast that it would cover the distance between San Diego, California, and Phoenix, Arizona in literally the blink of an eye. The team believes that the source of this incredible speed is a magnetic force called the magnetodynamic wind. The movement of this type of wind is controlled by the interaction of the star’s magnetic field and the gases in the disk around it.
“Although we don’t yet know for sure where it is [the jet] Where it comes from or how it is made, Prasad said, it is possible that the magnetodynamic wind is producing the jet, in which case the magnetic field is responsible for releasing the rotating material from the system. This can help us better understand the disk-wind dynamics in MWC 349A, and the interaction between stellar disks, winds and jets in other star systems. “
The team’s results were shown in 241 Proceedings of the American Astronomical Society (Opens in a new tab) On Monday, January 9th.
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