The ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) telescope has allowed to obtain extraordinary images of jets of material emitted by a newborn star. The object of this observation is called Herbig-Haro 46/47 and the analysis of the glow coming from its molecules of carbon monoxide has allowed to establish that the jets are even more energetic than expected.
Herbig-Haro objects, also called simply HH, are interstellar clouds of ionized gas with a faint glow visible inside or on the border of regions of star formation. They’re formed when jets of ionized gas ejected from the poles of newborn stars collide at very high speeds with more dense clouds of gas and dust.
Being associated with stars in the first stage of their formation, HH objects don’t last long in astronomical terms, no more than a few thousand years. Their first observations took place in the 19th century but it took decades for the instruments available to astronomers to be powerful enough to study them in depth.
In the late ’40s and early ’50s of the 20th century astronomers George Herbig and Guillermo Haro independently investigated them with details never seen before. It’s for this reason that those objects are now identified using the names of these two researchers.
Herbig-Haro 46/47 is about 1,400 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Vela. It’s already been observed using the ALMA telescope when it was still under construction and only a fraction of its 66 radiotelescopes were active, used for its test run and the first scientific research. Now that this huge interferometer has been completed, the observations are much better.
In particular, the new images of Herbig-Haro 46/47 revealed two jets of materials, one already known more or less directed towards the Earth and another directed in the opposite direction. Previously, this second jet was almost invisible in images produced at visible light because the clouds of dust surrounding the newly born star obscured it.
The observations made with ALMA revealed many details to have allowed astronomers to also discover a jet that goes to a totally different direction. It seems to come from a companion of the new star but it has a lower mass and therefore wasn’t detected earlier.
The best image of Herbig-Haro 46/47, however, was obtained by combining the observations made with ALMA with those made at visible light using ESO’s New Technology Telescope (NTT), located at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. It uses active optics that allow to obtain high quality images with a lightweight and thin mirror whose shape is adjusted by a dedicated system.
The result is an image that allows astronomers to study a newborn star showing us at the same time in an extraordinary way a wonder of the universe.
[ad name=”AmazonDocumentary”]
