Oral Presentation
Jets, Winds, and Disk Assembly in Embedded Protostars: insights from JWST
Presenter: Manoj Puravankara (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India)
Disks around Class 0/I protostars are assembled in an environment of active accretion from the surrounding envelope and vigorous mass loss through jets and winds. These outflows are thought to play a fundamental role in disk evolution by removing mass and angular momentum from the star–disk system, thereby driving accretion, regulating disk growth and influencing the initial conditions for planet formation. Despite their importance, the nature of the disk–outflow connection and the role of outflows in the embedded stages of disk evolution remain poorly understood.
Thus the protostellar phase represents a critical yet observationally challenging stage of stellar evolution, during which disks are assembled, disk–outflow coupling is established, and much of the final stellar mass is accumulated. Infrared diagnostics are essential for probing this phase, as the key tracers of shocks, molecular winds, and accretion-powered activity are heavily obscured at optical wavelengths. In this talk, I will present results from two of the largest JWST General Observer programs targeting the youngest protostars: Investigating Protostellar Accretion (IPA), a 67-hour Cycle 1 program probing accretion and outflows across a broad mass range (0.1–10 M⊙), and High Angular Resolution Observations of Stellar Emergence in Filamentary Environments (HEFE), a 180-hour Cycle 3 program providing an extensive spectral-imaging survey of protostars emerging from dense filaments.
Spatially resolved JWST imaging and spectroscopy reveal wide-angle molecular winds traced by warm and hot H₂, highly collimated jets, and stratified velocity and excitation structures that provide new insights into how mass and angular momentum are redistributed during the embedded stages of disk evolution. These observations reveal a close connection between accretion, disk winds, and feedback, place strong new constraints on disk-launched wind models, and offer a new perspective on the physical processes that shape disks during their earliest phases of assembly.
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