A Rotating Protostellar Jet Launched from the Innermost Disk of HH 212

TL;DR

This paper presents evidence that highly collimated protostellar jets from HH 212 remove angular momentum from the innermost disk regions at about 0.05 AU, facilitating material accretion onto the protostar.

Contribution

It provides observational support for jet-driven angular momentum removal at the innermost disk scales, confirming jet launching radius near 0.05 AU based on magneto-centrifugal theory.

Findings

Jet rotation measured down to ~10 AU from the protostar.

Jet launching radius estimated at ~0.05 AU.

Supports magneto-centrifugal jet launching model.

Abstract

The central problem in forming a star is the angular momentum in the circumstellar disk which prevents material from falling into the central stellar core. An attractive solution to the "angular momentum problem" appears to be the ubiquitous (low-velocity and poorly-collimated) molecular outflows and (high-velocity and highly-collimated) protostellar jets accompanying the earliest phase of star formation that remove angular momentum at a range of disk radii. Previous observations suggested that outflowing material carries away the excess angular momentum via magneto-centrifugally driven winds from the surfaces of circumstellar disks down to ~ 10 AU scales, allowing the material in the outer disk to transport to the inner disk. Here we show that highly collimated protostellar jets remove the residual angular momenta at the ~ 0.05 AU scale, enabling the material in the innermost region of the disk to accrete toward the central protostar. This is supported by the rotation of the jet measured down to ~ 10 AU from the protostar in the HH 212 protostellar system. The measurement implies a jet launching radius of ~ 0.05_{-0.02}^{+0.05} AU on the disk, based on the magneto-centrifugal theory of jet production, which connects the properties of the jet measured at large distances to those at its base through energy and angular momentum conservation.