Astronomers recently used two very different and powerful telescopes, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), to discover twin disks and twin parallel jets erupting from young stars in a multiple-star system. This discovery was unexpected and unprecedented, given the stars, disks, and jets’ age, size, and chemical makeup. Their location in a known, well-studied part of the Universe adds to the thrill. Read more here.
Image: © U.S. NSF/ NSF/ ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/ NASA/ JPL/ JWST/ B. Saxton; These brightly colored shapes represent astronomical data collected by ALMA and NASA’s JWST telescopes. On the left, a composite image overlaps ALMA and JWST data, revealing the discs and parallel jets emitting from the pair of binary stars in WL20. The breakdown of the separate ALMA data and JWST data representing various chemical compositions is shown on the right.