Resolving Twin Jets and Twin Disks with JWST and ALMA: The Young WL 20 Multiple System

Abstract

We report the discovery of jets emanating from pre-main-sequence objects exclusively at mid-infrared wavelengths, enabled by the superb sensitivity of JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument Medium-Resolution Spectrometer. These jets are observed only in lines of [Ni ii ], [Fe ii ], [Ar ii ], and [Ne ii ]. The H 2 emission, imaged in eight distinct transitions, has a completely different morphology, exhibiting a wide-angled, biconical shape, symmetrically distributed about the jet axes. Synergistic high-resolution Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations resolve a pair of side-by-side edge-on accretion disks lying at the origin of the twin mid-infrared jets. Assuming coevality of the components of the young multiple system under investigation, the system age is at least (2–2.5) × 10 6 yr, despite the discrepantly younger age inferred from the spectral energy distribution of the combined edge-on disk sources. The later system evolutionary stage is corroborated by ALMA observations of CO(2−1), 13 CO(2−1), and C 18 O(2−1), which show no traces of molecular outflows or remnant cavity walls. Consequently, the observed H 2 structures must have their origins in wide-angled disk winds, in the absence of any ambient, swept-up gas. In the context of recent studies of protostars, we propose an outflow evolutionary scenario in which the molecular gas component dominates in the youngest sources, whereas the fast, ionized jets dominate in the oldest sources, as is the case for the twin jets discovered in the WL 20 system.