Star’s growing pains caught in real time
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.028771
BBC : Stars in the final stages of formation are surrounded by a thick dusty disk. Jets of outflowing material shoot from the star’s poles. Over the years, astronomers have amassed snapshots of several young stars that feature both disks and jets. Now, for the first time, they have found an object whose jets have significantly grown between observations. The star known as W75N(B)-VLA2 was first observed by the Very Large Array of radio telescopes in 1996. At that time, the star’s stubby jet had barely cleared the top of the disk. When the VLA observed W75N(B)-VLA2 18 years later, the jet had elongated by a factor of three. What’s more, thanks to a previous observation by a different radio array, Europe’s JIVE, it’s apparent that the jet’s elongation is aligned with the star’s magnetic field. That finding suggests a key role for magnetism in star formation.