What is the task "java" (parent process "launchd") doing on MacOS X?
Pretty much all processes on OS X are launched by launchd (just open Activity Monitor and display All Processes Hierarchically). This is the root launchd though, which hints at a launchd job in [/System]/Library/LaunchDaemons or [/System]/Library/LaunchAgents.
If you don't want to search the plist files for launchd, you can open Terminal and run ps axv | grep java or ps vp 3173 (or whatever its process ID is right then) to see the command line arguments to java, which should specify which Java application (e.g. jar) is actually used for that process.