Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have observed a strange stellar phenomenon for the first time ever: A group of baby stars painting the walls of their nursery in seemingly coordinated jets of high-speed gas. And strangely, they are all pointing in the same direction.
"Astronomers have long assumed that as clouds collapse to form stars, the stars will tend to spin in the same direction," principal investigator Klaus Pontoppidan of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement."However, this has not been seen so directly before. These aligned, elongated structures are a historical record of the fundamental way that stars are born."
The observations revealed at least 20 newborn stars in the region that were actively emitting protostellar outflows. One group of 12 stars caught the team's attention. The jets blazing from these stars were all oriented in almost the exact same direction,"like sleet pouring down during a storm," according to the NASA statement. The team estimated that the outflows are relatively young, beginning between 200 to 1,400 years ago.