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Mark McCaughrean
Mark McCaughrean
@markmccaughrean@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

Teaser 😉

In the 1990s, I discovered this beauty while making an IR survey of dense molecular cloud cores in the Milky Way, searching for signs of star formation ✨🔭

Almost 10 light years long, it's a bipolar outflow of gas ejected at hundreds of km/sec from a young, massive protostar 🌟

Officially HH288, it's also called The Dragon Jet, thanks to its fire-breathing appearance 🐉

And next week, you'll get to see my JWST image of it – it's special 😱

Stay tuned 📻

#Space #SpaceScience #Astronomy

An image of space showing many stars and a long, linear feature running from upper right to lower left. It resembles a Chinese dragon, with the head breathing fire to the lower left, and the long tail to the upper right. The image is monochrome, but has been rendered with a look-up table where the background is red and the brighter stars and jet are yellow.
An image of space showing many stars and a long, linear feature running from upper right to lower left. It resembles a Chinese dragon, with the head breathing fire to the lower left, and the long tail to the upper right. The image is monochrome, but has been rendered with a look-up table where the background is red and the brighter stars and jet are yellow.
An image of space showing many stars and a long, linear feature running from upper right to lower left. It resembles a Chinese dragon, with the head breathing fire to the lower left, and the long tail to the upper right. The image is monochrome, but has been rendered with a look-up table where the background is red and the brighter stars and jet are yellow.
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Mark McCaughrean
Mark McCaughrean
@markmccaughrean@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

To give a little more background information, the picture above is a colourised monochrome image of HH288 taken in the 2.12 micron wavelength line of shocked molecular hydrogen.

This is a classic tracer of outflows & jets from very young, embedded protostars, including HH211 & HH212, other jets we discovered in the 90s.

But The Dragon Jet appears to be associated with a significantly more massive protostar, or more's the point, protostars – there are several outflows here in fact.

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Mark McCaughrean
Mark McCaughrean
@markmccaughrean@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

I originally discovered HH288 in 1991 using a telescope on Kitt Peak in Arizona. Follow-up observations included this image in the H2 line, taken from Calar Alto in Spain in 1996.

We also conducted millimetre observations of the jet from Plateau de Bure in France & the Sierra Nevada range in Spain, showing that there are at least two massive outflows.

You can read the 2001 paper I wrote with Frédéric Gueth & Peter Schilke here:

https://scixplorer.org/abs/2001A%26A...375.1018G/abstract

NASA/ADS

An interferometric study of the HH 288 molecular outflow

We present an interferometric study of the CO line emission in the HH 288 molecular outflow. The IRAM Plateau de Bure interferometer was used to obtain an 11-field mosaic covering the whole flow ( ~ 2 pc) with an angular resolution of about 3.5'' (7000 AU at a distance of 2 kpc). The data were complemented with short-spacings derived from IRAM 30-m observations. The exciting source of HH 288, IRAS 00342+6347, is a young (dynamical age of the outflow =~ a few 104 years) intermediate-mass (bolometric luminosity =~ 500lsun , envelope mass =~ 6 to 30msun ) embedded protostar. This source is likely to be an intermediate-mass counterpart of a classical Class 0 low-mass protostar. HH 288 is actually a quadrupolar outflow, and the angular resolution provided by the interferometric observations allows us to rule out models involving limb-brightened walls of a wide-angle single flow to explain such a morphology. The presence of two protostars in the central condensation is the most appealing explanation to account for the presence of the two flows. While the small East-West flow has a quite simple morphology and kinematics, the large North-South flow includes several overlapping structures, created by successive ejection events. Large collimated limb-brightened cavities are observed, with high-velocity material located along or near the flow axis. The internal structure of HH 288, including morphological coincidence between the CO and H2 emission, supports prompt entrainment at the head of large bow-shocks as the main formation process of molecular outflows from intermediate-mass protostars. Based on observations carried out with the IRAM Plateau de Bure Interferometer. IRAM is supported by INSU/CNRS (France), MPG (Germany), and IGN (Spain).
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Mark McCaughrean
Mark McCaughrean
@markmccaughrean@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

The new JWST data cover the full 1-5 micron range, including emission from molecular hydrogen & continuum from stars, reflection nebulae, & embedded protostars.

They also have 10-20 times better spatial resolution than the old data & go much deeper.

The resulting image is in full colour & is spectacular, but also reveals a lot more about this complex region of star formation.

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Mark McCaughrean
Mark McCaughrean
@markmccaughrean@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

As a demonstration of how much better the JWST data are, & without giving too much away at this point, here's a small section of the old Calar Alto monochrome molecular hydrogen image alongside the JWST view of the same part.

This covers less than 1% of the full JWST image 😬✌️

2 media
A red-yellow colourised monochrome image of a small region of the sky near HH288, the Dragon Jet. The image was taken in the 2.12 micron line of molecular hydrogen emission.
A red-yellow colourised monochrome image of a small region of the sky near HH288, the Dragon Jet. The image was taken in the 2.12 micron line of molecular hydrogen emission.
A red-yellow colourised monochrome image of a small region of the sky near HH288, the Dragon Jet. The image was taken in the 2.12 micron line of molecular hydrogen emission.
A full colour 1-5 micron wavelength infrared image of the same region of the sky near HH288, The Dragon Jet, taken with JWST. Far more detail is seen in the small region of shocked molecular hydrogen gas, seen in red, with many stars surrounding it, and also some galaxies. The brighter stars have the classic JWST diffraction pattern.
A full colour 1-5 micron wavelength infrared image of the same region of the sky near HH288, The Dragon Jet, taken with JWST. Far more detail is seen in the small region of shocked molecular hydrogen gas, seen in red, with many stars surrounding it, and also some galaxies. The brighter stars have the classic JWST diffraction pattern.
A full colour 1-5 micron wavelength infrared image of the same region of the sky near HH288, The Dragon Jet, taken with JWST. Far more detail is seen in the small region of shocked molecular hydrogen gas, seen in red, with many stars surrounding it, and also some galaxies. The brighter stars have the classic JWST diffraction pattern.
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