Can newly-forming stars act like Mini-QSOs?

The birth of stars takes place inside dense molecular clouds and is therefore difficult to observe with optical telescopes. Yet some stars form at the edges of clouds, and combined radio, infrared, optical and X-ray observations have recently revealed a great deal of structure: over a wide range of luminosities one observes high mass-outflow rates from pre-Main-Sequence and T Tauri-stars, with wind momenta exceeding the radiation momenta by large factors. The mass flows take the shape of two highly supersonic jets, perpendicular to a circumstellar disk. The jets have knotlike condensations, show strong linear polarization along the flow direction, and are often seen to reconverge. They resemble the twin-jets from the nuclei of active galaxies and may be driven by a similar type of engine. They may even hold a clue to the problem of how stars like our Sun got rid of the enormous angular momentum of their progenitor cloud. I propose that in both phenomena, the central engine is the maximally rotating core of a massive disk which produces a pair of thin, antipodal, magnetized relativistic jets.