Herbig-Haro 30

Herbig-Haro 30 is the prototype of a gas-rich "young stellar object" disk around a star. The dark disk spans 40 billion miles (64 billion kilometers) in this image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, cutting the bright nebula in two and blocking the central star from direct view. Volunteers can help astronomers find more disks like this through DiskDetective.org, which incorporates data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.

This image was taken by Hubble's former instrument, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

Photo credit: NASA/Hubble/STScI

Note: For more information, see NASA-Sponsored 'Disk Detective' Lets Public Search for New Planetary Nurseries.

HH 46/47

Combined observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the newly completed Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile have revealed the throes of stellar birth, as never before, in the well-studied object known as HH 46/47.

Herbig-Haro (HH) objects form when jets shot out by newborn stars collide with surrounding material, producing small, bright, nebulous regions. To our eyes, the dynamics within many HH objects are obscured by enveloping gas and dust. But the infrared and submillimeter light seen by Spitzer and ALMA, respectively, pierces the dark cosmic cloud around HH 46/47 to let us in on the action. (Infrared light has longer wavelengths than what we see with our eyes, and submillimeter light has even longer wavelengths.)

In this image, the shorter-wavelength light appears blue and longer-wavelength light, red. Blue shows gas energized by the outflowing jets. The green colors trace a combination of hydrogen gas molecules and dust that follows the boundary of the gas cloud cocooning the young star. The reddish-colored areas, created by excited carbon monoxide gas, reveal that the gas in the two lobes blown out by the star's jets is expanding faster than previously thought. This faster expansion has an influence on the overall amount of turbulence in the gaseous cloud that originally spawned the star. In turn, the extra turbulence could have an impact on whether and how other stars might form in this gaseous, dusty, and thus fertile, ground for star-making.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ALMA

Note: For more information, see Spitzer and ALMA Reveal a Star's Bubbly Birth.

HH 151

This image shows an object known as HH 151, a bright jet of glowing material trailed by an intricate, orange-hued plume of gas and dust. It is located some 460 light-years away in the constellation of Taurus (The Bull), near to the young, tumultuous star HL Tau.

In the first few hundred thousand years of life, new stars like HL Tau pull in material that falls towards them from the surrounding space. This material forms a hot disc that swirls around the coalescing body, launching narrow streams of material from its poles. These jets are shot out at speeds of several hundred kilometers per second and collide violently with nearby clumps of dust and gas, creating wispy, billowing structures known as Herbig-Haro objects — like HH 151 seen in the image above.

Such objects are very common in star-forming regions. They are short-lived, and their motion and evolution can actually be seen over very short timescales, on the order of years. They quickly race away from the newly-forming star that emitted them, colliding with new clumps of material and glowing brightly before fading away.

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA. Acknowledgement: Gilles Chapdelaine

Herbig-Haro 110

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a new image of Herbig-Haro 110, a geyser of hot gas flowing from a newborn star. HH 110 appears different from most other Herbig-Haro objects: in particular, it appears on its own while they usually come in pairs. Astronomers think it may be a continuation of another object called HH 270, after it has been deflected off a dense cloud of gas.

Photo credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage team (STScI/AURA)

Note: For more information, see A Geyser of Hot Gas Flowing From a Star.

Twin Jets in Herbig-Haro 34

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope took this image of a baby star sprouting two identical jets (green lines emanating from fuzzy star). The jet on the right had been seen before in visible-light views, but the jet at left -- the identical twin to the first jet -- could only be seen in detail with Spitzer's infrared detectors. The left jet was hidden behind a dark cloud, which Spitzer can see through.

The twin jets, in a system called Herbig-Haro 34, are made of identical knots of gas and dust, ejected one after another from the area around the star. By studying the spacing of these knots, and knowing the speed of the jets from previous studies, astronomers were able to determine that the jet to the right of the star punches its material out 4.5 years later than the counter-jet.

The new data also reveal that the area from which the jets originate is contained within a sphere around the star, with a radius of 3 astronomical units. An astronomical unit is the distance between Earth and the Sun. Previous studies estimated that the maximum size of this jet-making zone was 10 times larger.

The wispy material is gas and dust. Arc-shaped bow shocks can be seen at the ends of the twin jets. The shocks consist of compressed material in front of the jets.

The Herbig-Haro 34 jets are located at approximately 1,400 light-years away in the Orion constellation.

Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Herbig-Haro Objects in the Orion Complex

This image from the Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) 4-meter telescope shows a roughly 1/2-degree square region of the sky in the constellation of Orion (about the same size as the diameter of the full Moon). This is a small part of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, a giant region of gas and dust undergoing active star formation some 1,500 light-years away.

Numerous small knots known as Herbig-Haro Objects, labeled here in white, are signatures of recently formed stars ejecting material into space. The three HH objects labeled in green have been subjects of intense study by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope over several years, resulting in a better understanding of how the material ejected from stars interacts with the surrounding medium.

Photo credit: Z. Levay (STScI), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), and H. Schweiker (NOAO/AURA/NSF)

Stellar Jets HH 47, HH 34 and HH 2

The glowing, clumpy streams of material shown in these NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images are the signposts of star birth.

Ejected episodically by young stars like cannon salvos, the blobby material zips along at more than 700,000 kilometers per hour. The speedy jets are confined to narrow beams by the powerful stellar magnetic field. Called Herbig-Haro or HH objects, these outflows have a bumpy ride through space.

When fast-moving blobs collide with slower-moving gas, bow shocks arise as the material heats up. Bow shocks are glowing waves of material similar to waves produced by the bow of a ship ploughing through water.

In HH 2, at lower right, several bow shocks can be seen where several fast-moving clumps have bunched up like cars in a traffic jam. In HH 34, at lower left, a grouping of merged bow shocks reveals regions that brighten and fade over time as the heated material cools where the shocks intersect.

In HH 47, at top, the blobs of material look like a string of cars on a crowded motorway, which ends in a chain-reaction accident. The smash up creates the bow shock, left.

These images are part of a series of time-lapse movies astronomers have made showing the outflows' motion over time. The movies were stitched together from images taken over a 14-year period by Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. Hubble followed the jets over three epochs: HH 2 from 1994, 1997, and 2007; HH 34 from 1994, 1998, and 2007; and HH 47 from 1994, 1999, and 2008.

The outflows are roughly 1350 light-years from Earth. HH 34 and HH 2 reside near the Orion Nebula, in the northern sky. HH 47 is located in the southern constellation of Vela.

Photo credit: NASA, ESA, and P. Hartigan (Rice University)

Note: For more information, see Hubble Movies Provide Unprecedented View of Supersonic Jets from Young Stars.

NGC 6729 - The Drama of Starbirth

A new image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope gives a close-up view of the dramatic effects new-born stars have on the gas and dust from which they formed. Although the stars themselves are not visible, material they have ejected is colliding with the surrounding gas and dust clouds and creating a surreal landscape of glowing arcs, blobs and streaks.

The star-forming region NGC 6729 is part of one of the closest stellar nurseries to the Earth and hence one of the best studied. This new image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope gives a close-up view of a section of this strange and fascinating region (a wide-field view is available here: eso1027).

Stars form deep within molecular clouds and the earliest stages of their development cannot be seen in visible-light telescopes because of obscuration by dust. In this image there are very young stars at the upper left of the picture. Although they cannot be seen directly, the havoc that they have wreaked on their surroundings dominates the picture. High-speed jets of material that travel away from the baby stars at velocities as high as one million kilometers per hour are slamming into the surrounding gas and creating shock waves. These shocks cause the gas to shine and create the strangely colored glowing arcs and blobs known as Herbig–Haro objects [1].

In this view the Herbig–Haro objects form two lines marking out the probable directions of ejected material. One stretches from the upper left to the lower center, ending in the bright, circular group of glowing blobs and arcs at the lower center. The other starts near the left upper edge of the picture and extends towards the center right. The peculiar scimitar-shaped bright feature at the upper left is probably mostly due to starlight being reflected from dust and is not a Herbig–Haro object.

This enhanced-color picture [2] was created from images taken using the FORS1 instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Images were taken through two different filters that isolate the light coming from glowing hydrogen (shown as orange) and glowing ionized sulfur (shown as blue). The different colors in different parts of this violent star formation region reflect different conditions — for example where ionized sulfur is glowing brightly (blue features) the velocities of the colliding material are relatively low — and help astronomers to unravel what is going on in this dramatic scene.

Notes

[1] The astronomers George Herbig and Guillermo Haro were not the first to see one of the objects that now bear their names, but they were the first to study the spectra of these strange objects in detail. They realized that they were not just clumps of gas and dust that reflected light, or glowed under the influence of the ultraviolet light from young stars, but were a new class of objects associated with ejected material in star formation regions.

[2] Both the ionized sulfur and hydrogen atoms in this nebula emit red light. To differentiate between them in this image the sulfur emission has been colored blue.

Photo credit: ESO/Sergey Stepanenko