Are you one of the authors of this paper? Email us from your institutional or work email address mentioning this article's arXiv ID and we'll verify you and give you edit access to this page.
Are you an author who sees something we missed or got wrong? Write to us — the subject line already carries the paper id. We read every note and correct the write-up.
Each knot is a separate "shot": the star ejects gas not in a steady stream but in bursts, with pauses in between.
Two of the jets bend like the letter S. This happens when the source of the outflow wobbles slightly, like a garden hose in a hand that sways from side to side. For small, Sun-like stars, such jets are common. But here, in the W49N region, stars are born that are tens of times more massive than the Sun, and the outflows carry thousands of times more energy.
W49N is a true star factory: it hosts the brightest watermaser in the entire Galaxy.
This discovery shows that the mechanism that drives jets in newborn stars does not depend on their size. Whether a small star or a giant, the heart beats the same.
