Near-infrared/optical studies of outflows and jets from young stellar objects

The birth of a star involves not only accretion but paradoxically outflow as well. In order to fully understand the outflow phenomenon we need to study them close to their driving sources. Long-slit spectroscopy allows us to do this with the minimum contamination effects from the stellar continuum and using spectro-astrometry we can study the properties of the individual emission-line regions on the smallest spatial scales available. Hence we can provide the observations needed to test the different models for jet launching and accretion. The spectro-astrometric technique studies the small-scale structure by revealing the position of the centroid of the emission line features relative to the center of the continuum emission. We used this technique to great effect in two recent studies. We combined long-slit spectroscopy with spectro-astrometry to study the possibility that Paschen beta (1.2822 mum) may be a tracer of outflows from classical T Tauri stars. Also we mapped the near-infrared forbidden emission line regions of a sample of Class I protostars in [Fe II] (1.644 mum). Here the results from this first study are presented.