Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2026

26 ASTRO PUBLISHING The findings, from a research team led by Tao-Chung Ching, a former NSF NRAO Jansky Fellow under the mentorship of scientist Emmanuel Momjian, focused on NGC 1333 IRAS 4A, a young double-star system embedded in the Perseus molecular cloud, roughly 960 light-years from Earth. Newborn stars grow by pulling in gas and dust from a surrounding disk of material. As they do, they also blast some of that material back out into space in fast, narrow jets NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2026 Twisted Physics: 30-year-old stellar mystery solved by NRAO A stronomers using the Ata- cama Large Millimeter/sub- millimeter Array (ALMA), of which the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astron- omy Observatory (NSF NRAO) is a partner, have captured the first di- rect, high-resolution images of a magnetic field wrapped tightly around the outflow of gas stream- ing away from a forming star — ev- idence that solves a decades-old puzzle about how young stars sculpt the powerful jets that form them.