Hubble takes beautiful image of turbulent stellar nursery

October 18, 2022  22:27

Hubble Space Telescope has taken a beautiful image of the Herbig-Haro objects HH 1 and HH 2, which are in the constellation Orion about 1,250 light years from Earth.

HH 1 can be seen in the upper right corner of the image -- it's the glowing cloud above a bright star. And HH 2 is the cloud at the bottom left.

Herbig Haro objects

Herbig-Haro objects are luminous clusters that can be seen around some newborn stars. They are formed by the collision of jets of gas ejected by these young stars with the surrounding gases and dust at incredibly high speeds. The particles of these objects are indeed moving at enormous speeds: according to Hubble Space Telescope observations dating back to 2002, the dust and gas particles in HH 1 travel at more than 400 kilometers per second, or 1,400,000 kilometers per hour.

Although the image clearly shows both Herbig-Haro objects, the young star system "responsible" for their creation is hidden from view - it's behind the thick dust clouds in the center of the image. However, in the image, you can see a bright jet of ionized gas bursting out of the central dark cloud from one of the young stars.

The source of this jet was once thought to be a bright star that can be seen between the jet and the HH 1 cloud, but it is now known to be only a double star that formed nearby and is not related to this cloud.

This image of the turbulent stellar nursery was taken by the Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) using 11 different filters in the infrared, visible and ultraviolet. Each of these filters is sensitive to only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and they allow astronomers to study interesting processes in space.

The image was taken at the request of two groups of scientists who are working on two different studies. The first is studying the structure and motion of the Herbig-Haro objects visible in this image to better understand the physical processes that occur when fluxes from young stars collide with the surrounding gas and dust.

The second study examines the outflows themselves to lay the groundwork for future observations with the James Webb Space Telescope, which, unlike Hubble, can "look behind" the dust clouds surrounding young stars.

Hubble and James Webb telescopes recently took pictures of the same galaxy, but showed it quite differently. According to scientists, the comparison of images from both telescopes allows a better understanding of the structure of the galaxy IC 5332.


 
 
 
 
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