The earliest stages of star formation set the initial conditions for planetary systems and the precursor of life. During this protostellar phase, the accretion and ejection govern the evolution of the central star and its surrounding disk. The emerging paradigm suggests that disk-launched winds play a central role in this evolution by extracting angular momentum, thereby driving accretion and enabling stellar growth. At larger scales, these outflows provide critical feedback that regulates star formation rates and the stellar initial mass function.
Despite their fundamental importance, the launching and propagation mechanisms of these winds remain poorly constrained due to observational limits. In this talk, I will present high-angular resolution observations of protostellar winds from five Class 0 sources spanning a wide luminosity range (Lbol~0.1 to 104L☉), obtained with the NIRSpec/IFU and MIRI/MRS instruments onboard the James Webb Space Telescope as part of the Investigating Protostellar Accretion (IPA) program. I will present the unprecedented details of the morphology, kinematics, and dynamics of the molecular hydrogen (H2) winds from these protostars across the mass spectrum. Our studies suggest that the wide-angled winds from protostars, traced by warm/hot (600-2000 K) and fast-moving (20-50 km/s) H2 gas, are driven from the disk. More importantly, these winds dominate the mass-outflow budget, and their momentum rates scale monotonically with the bolometric luminosity of the central source, establishing wide-angled winds as a fundamental and ubiquitous component of protostellar feedback. Finally, I will introduce the JWST Cycle 3 Large program HEFE and our group's preliminary results from this program.
Himanshu Tyagi is a PhD student, working with Prof. Manoj Puravankara in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at TIFR. His work leverages the unprecedented capabilities of the JWST to study the physics and chemistry of protostars and protoplanetary disks. He is a core team member of the JWST GO teams, Investigating Protostellar Accretion (IPA) program, and the Cycle 3 HEFE Large Program. At TIFR, he is a core member of the TSPFE group and the Multi-Object Infrared Spectrograph (MOIS) team. He also leads an ongoing large survey on the uGMRT to study the nearby (<500 pc) protostars.
