Jets also provide astronomers with a unique glimpse of the inner workings of the star and disk. Burrows, Hester, Morse and their co-investigators independently observed several star birth sites in our galactic neighborhood. We are clearly seeing a process that is a crucial part of star formation, and not just the peculiarities of a few oddball objects. The researchers all agree that the Hubble pictures generally confirm models of star formation but will send theorists back to the drawing board to explain the details. Changes are occurring so rapidly in the jets that Hubble will be able to follow their evolution of these objects over the next decade.
Stellar jets are analogous to giant lawn sprinklers.
Whether a sprinkler whirls, pulses or oscillates, it offers insights into how its tiny mechanism works. Likewise stellar jets, billions or trillions of miles long offer some clues to what's happening close into the star at scales of only millions of miles, which are below even Hubble's ability to resolve detail. Material either at or near the star is heated and blasted into space, where it travels for billions of miles before colliding with interstellar material. The Hubble pictures increase the mystery as to how jets are confined into a thin beam. The pictures tend to rule out the earlier notion that a disk was needed to form a nozzle for collimating the jets, much like a garden hose nozzle squeezes water to a narrow stream.