ESO telescope captures stellar sprinkler in the Orion Nebula

The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) captured this spectacular image of a young star, named 244-440, in the Orion Nebula. The image is the sharpest ever taken of this object - even sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope - and shows a wiggly magenta-structured jet of matter launched close to the star.

According to ESO, very young stars are often surrounded by discs of material falling towards the star. Some of this material can be expelled into powerful jets perpendicularly to the disc. In the case of 244-440, the S-shaped jet seen in the ESO image suggests that there may be two stars at the center of this object orbiting each other. This would cause the orientation of the jet to periodically change, similar to a water sprinkler. Alternatively, the strong radiation from other stars in the Orion cloud could be altering the shape of the jet.

The observations of the S-shaped jet of 244-440 were made using the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument at ESO's VLT in Chile. The MUSE instrument was used to map the distribution of iron, nitrogen, and oxygen around the young star.

MUSE is installed at the VLT’s Unit Telescope 4 which is equipped with advanced adaptive optics technology that corrects for the blurring effect of Earth's atmosphere, which can distort the images of astronomical objects. This helps it deliver images sharper than NASA's Hubble.

The new observations of 244-440 will provide astronomers with unprecedented detail on how stars are born in massive clouds like Orion.

1/ This Picture of the Week, taken with our VLT, shows a young star expelling a jet (seen in magenta). The "S" shape of this jet suggests that it may be coming from a star orbiting another star, changing the orientation of the jet like a water sprinkler. 📷 @ESO /Kirwan et al. pic.twitter.com/JRcAFzAkXa

— ESO (@ESO) April 17, 2023