As already stated we have already made major inroads by finding a whole new method for measuring magnetic fields in outflows from young stars, imaging accretion onto protostars, and determining the molecular versus ionised/atomic content of outflows using infrared spectroscopy from space. All of these discoveries represent progress beyond the state of the art. Of course, and as normal in science, further questions are raised by our results. For example it is now clear, particularly through our use of LOFAR, that low frequency non-thermal radio emission from shocks is detectable in outflows. This suggests that such shocks can accelerate particles to relativistic velocities, despite the shock velocities being much lower than those of supernova remnants. Such findings are very challenging for standard acceleration models. Moreover, the presence of such particles may have a direct impact on whether accretion disks are ionised at a few au from their star, since galactic cosmic rays, particularly low energy ones, are excluded from the vicinity of the disk by the star’s strong magnetosphere. High energy particles from outflows could ensure coupling of the magnetic field to the neutral gas and perhaps enhance transport of angular momentum.
There are a number of major achievements of the project not mentioned previously. In particular we have made the first radio images of outflows using the upgraded interferometer e-MERLIN. As radio emission can be used to probe the launching region very close to the source, even when the optical extinction is many orders of magnitude, very tight constraints were obtained for the youngest sources implying jet focusing on scales of several au. As a result of obtaining this legacy data, we were also awarded large amounts of observing time on the VLA to target sources in a multi-frequency approach. One rather striking finding was that one outflow from the binary source L1551 IRS 5 almost vanished in approximately a decade.
SPIRou is only now producing the first magnetic field maps of embedded young stars which we accessed through of our membership of the SPIRou Consortium (supported through our ERC award). Field strengths for these sources appear similar to those of less embedded sources and, more importantly, seem to be dynamo generated. In the case of one known accreting young star (DK Tau) we were able not only to measure the magnetic field of the star and to determine its inner disk is misaligned with respect to its outer disk, but also to detect changes in the magnetic field strength on periods of years.
During the award's final phase, we obtained observations from JWST which in turn led to an enormous number of high profile publications. Aside from the major result on one of the youngest know outflows, Herbig-Haro 211, we were also involved in the discovery of water, carbon dioxide and abundant hydrocarbons, including ices, in the terrestrial planet forming zones in disks around young stars. These discoveries give us a much clearer picture of what conditions are like for planetary formation which we have recently realised begins much earlier than previously thought.
