Star Formation Under the Outflow: The Discovery of a Non-thermal Jet from OMC-2 FIR 3 and Its Relationship to the Deeply Embedded FIR 4 Protostar

Abstract

We carried out multiwavelength (0.7–5 cm), multi-epoch (1994–2015) Very Large Array (VLA) observations toward the region enclosing the bright far-IR sources FIR 3 (HOPS 370) and FIR 4 (HOPS 108) in OMC-2. We report the detection of 10 radio sources, 7 of them identified as young stellar objects. We image a well-collimated radio jet with a thermal free–free core (VLA 11) associated with the Class I intermediate-mass protostar HOPS 370. The jet features several knots (VLA 12N, 12C, 12S) of non-thermal radio emission (likely synchrotron from shock-accelerated relativistic electrons) at distances of ~7500–12,500 au from the protostar, in a region where other shock tracers have been previously identified. These knots are moving away from the HOPS 370 protostar at ~100 km s^(−1). The Class 0 protostar HOPS 108, which itself is detected as an independent, kinematically decoupled radio source, falls in the path of these non-thermal radio knots. These results favor the previously proposed scenario in which the formation of HOPS 108 is triggered by the impact of the HOPS 370 outflow with a dense clump. However, HOPS 108 has a large proper motion velocity of ~30 km s^(−1), similar to that of other runaway stars in Orion, whose origin would be puzzling within this scenario. Alternatively, an apparent proper motion could result because of changes in the position of the centroid of the source due to blending with nearby extended emission, variations in the source shape, and/or opacity effects.

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