About a decade ago T Tau was discovered to be binary, with separation 0.7 arcseconds. These objects, which have now been found toward a number of young stars, are usually too faint to detect at visible wavelengths, yet they are frequently more luminous than their primaries, and dominate the system in the near to mid infrared. Of interest to us were the interactions of the intense winds from T Tauri with the nearby molecular cloud which had given birth to the object and its companion. In addition to studying the gas surrounding T Tauri we were also eager to get a clear view of the object and its companion. More than fifteen distinct arcs and loops appear in the extended molecular hydrogen emission in Figure 7.
North is up and east to the left.
Imperfect subtraction of the stellar continuum produces artifacts at the location of the two stars, so we have superimposed the innermost H emission from Herbst et al. Note that the bright knot to the northwest of the stars is a line emission object, T Tau NW, and not one of the binary components. Extended molecular hydrogen emission in a star forming region is frequently the signpost of shock waves excited as an outflow from a star encounters the ambient cloud. These spectra revealed that the molecular hydrogen arcs and loops we had imaged indeed contained shock excited gas. We propose that the complex morphology of the molecular hydrogen image can be explained by two almost perpendicular outflows, one arising from each of the two stars.