The James Webb Space Telescope has provided unprecedented glimpses into the turbulent ‘pancakes’ of gas and dust surrounding young stars, offering a glimpse into the formative years of our solar system. This captivating blog post explores the telescope’s discoveries, including how magnetic field-driven winds help stars and planets take shape. James Webb Space Telescope, Protoplanetary Disk
Cosmic Nurseries Revealed: How JWST Will Peer Inside Protoplanetary Disks
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) transformed our view to the origins of stars and planets. Astronomers used the facility’s Advanced Camera for Surveys to obtain a new, completely infrared picture of the star-forming region NGC 281 in which is embedded stars hidden behind dark clouds of gas.
These disks are important sites for star formation and planetary formation in the end. Led by Ilaria Pascucci from the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, a team of scientists has shed new light on the ‘winds’ that drive one type of protoplanetary disk, helping us to build a picture of how these features form around newborn stars.
Figuring Out How Stars Get Fatter: What JWST Can Learn from Protostellar Winds
For who knows how long, astrophysicists have puzzled over the mystery of how young stars amass all the material needed to make them truly massive. The recent findings from JWST have lent far greater support to the idea that magnetic field-driven winds are key in it.
At dozens of miles per second and a distance hundreds of times that between the Earth and Sun, these winds can rid spinning gas and dust from the protoplanetary. In this way, material is funneled into the protostellar surface and accreted, enabling the protostar to grow and become a main sequence (or ‘adult’) star.
Peeling Back the Onion: JWST 3D Mapping of Protoplanetary Disk Winds
One of the main results from the JWST observations was being able to distinguish between different types of winds in the protoplanetary disks (magnetised outflows, thermal jets and X-winds). To track the individual atoms and molecules as they moved across these disks, researchers selected edge-on disk systems that permitted the Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) of JWST to allocate them.
This provided the team with a precise 3D image of both the core jets and the ‘onion-like’ enveloping disk winds. Most importantly, they found these cones created by the winds to contain a large central hole, which they are now looking into how they might affect providing gas to baby stars.
