Young star shoots matter like a garden hose

The Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in northern Chile has made the clearest image of a stellar object called 244-440. A strange digital name was given to a young star located in the Orion nebula at a distance of 1,350 light-years from Earth. The peculiarity of the object is that it throws a powerful jet of matter into space, like a garden hose.

The S-shaped matter (in purple), flying out of a stellar object in the Orion nebula called 244-440, was recorded by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on the Very Large Telescope. Photo: ESO 

“Very young stars are often surrounded by disks of material falling on the star. Some of this material can be ejected into powerful jets perpendicular to the protoplanetary disk,” explains ESO

However, the S-shaped jet shooting out of 244-440 indicates that not one, but two stars orbiting each other are hiding in the center of this object. This orbital motion periodically changes the orientation of the jet, like a water sprinkler. Another possibility of such a shape is that strong radiation from other stars in the Orion cloud can change the shape of the jet.

Magic MUSE

The image was taken by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) device, which is installed on the VLT ESO. The red, green and blue colors visible in the image reflect the distribution of iron, nitrogen and oxygen, respectively. However, this is only a small part of the data collected by MUSE, which actually makes thousands of images of different colors and wavelengths at the same time. Incredible imaging technology allows scientists to study the distribution of various chemical elements and how they move.

MUSE is also equipped with advanced optical technology that corrects the effect of blurring the earth’s atmosphere, without which the images of astronomical objects would be very blurry. Even though MUSE is on Earth, its advanced technology allows it to provide images that are sharper than those of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

Earlier we reported on the TOP 4 telescopes that would be built before 2030.

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