Astronomers capture time-stamped rings in jet from newborn star
Astronomers have captured the most detailed images ever taken of a jet launched by a young star, confirming a theoretical model that has remained untested for three decades.
Published today in , the images reveal a series of delicate, ring-like structures that record decades of violent outbursts during the star鈥檚 early life.
The international study, which included astronomers at The University of 水多多导航, used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), one of the world鈥檚 most advanced astronomical facilities.
The team focused on a fast-moving jet emerging from SVS 13, a binary system around 1,000 light-years from Earth, capturing high-resolution images that show hundreds of nested molecular rings. Each group of rings trace the aftermath of an energetic burst during the star鈥檚 infancy.
The findings provide the first direct confirmation of a three decade old model of these jets, allowing the reconstruction of the chronological record of how forming stars feed on, and then explosively expel, surrounding material.
is a co-author on the paper and Principal Investigator of the UK ALMA Regional Centre Node, which supports UK astronomers in their use of the ALMA observatory.
He said: 鈥淎LMA has provided a level of precision we鈥檝e never been able to achieve before. These images give us a completely new way of reading a young star鈥檚 history.
Each group of rings is effectively a time-stamp of a past eruption. It gives us an important new insight into how young stars grow and how their developing planetary systems are shaped.鈥�
Stars like the Sun form deep within dense clouds of gas and dust. In their earliest stages, they undergo energetic outbursts that heat and disturb the material around them. At the same time, they launch rapid, tightly collimated jets of gas that play a crucial role in regulating how the star accumulates matter and how its surrounding disc 鈥� where future planets eventually form 鈥� evolves.
The team identified more than 400 individual rings in the jet from SVS 13, showing how its shape and speed change over time as it punches through its environment. Using this data, the researchers reconstructed the jet鈥檚 3D structure in unprecedented detail 鈥� a technique they describe as 鈥渃osmic tomography鈥�.
They found that the youngest ring matches a bright outburst observed from the SVS 13 system in the early 1990s. This is the first time astronomers have been able to directly connect a specific burst of activity in a forming star with a change in the speed of its jet.
The project involved researchers from 16 institutions across eight countries and was led by the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) in Spain. The new ALMA observations form part of a long-running project to understand how stars and planets form, building on earlier work from the US National Science Foundation鈥檚 Very Large Array (VLA), which first revealed the jets from SVS 13.
ALMA is run by the which is operated by , and . The (UK ARC Node) is supported by .
This research was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Full title: 'Bowshocks driven by the pole-on molecular jet of outbursting protostar SVS 13'
DOI: 10.1038/s41550-025-02716-2
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