Jets

Here are some pictures of supersonic outflows from forming stars, taken with the Mt. Hopkins 48" telescope way back in the early 90s (published in Gomez, Whitney, & Kenyon 1997). They are kind of neat because they show the whole cloud from which the protostar is forming. There is a white bar in the images that measures 1 arcminute, or 8400 AU at the distance to Taurus. The jets are not as bright or jet-like (straight) as some of the more famous sources, and this could be because of the lower luminosity and therefore lower energetics of these low-mass sources. The jets show up as red in these images. We got these by looking through a filter centered at 673.2 nanometer wavelength, a transition of ionized sulphur. The visible radiation such as your eye would see shows up as white, and we color the infrared sources in green.

Source name

04016+2610
04169+2702
04248+2612
04302+2247
04368+2557
L1551 region (includes HL Tau, HH30, XZ Tau at the top). This one is really cool.
 
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