The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped an incredible picture of a young star with twin jets. The object is called HH 24 and it’s part of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, a large group of nebulae located over 1,350 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Orion. The twin jets are the densest concentration of stellar jets ever observed in such a small region.
Stars form from giant molecular clouds. They first collapse in smaller clumps that eventually become dense enough to generate nuclear fusion at their core; a protostar is born. The protostar phase lasts for about 10 million years, in which the objects accretes new gas and disperses the cloud that surrounds it.
Protostars are known to produce Herbig-Haro objects, astrophysical jets made of a small puff of material that form when gas clouds collide with young stars. The HH in HH 24 stands for Herbig-Haro. The HH objects are usually between one to 20 times the mass of Earth (a tiny fraction of the stellar mass) and reach temperatures between 8,000 and 12,000 Kelvins.
After the birth of the protostar, part of the gas cloud tends to form a disk around it, and as more and more material falls on the protostar, it becomes more active. The young star emits energized gas from its poles and, as it streams away at supersonic speeds, the tangled clumps we see are the result of shockwaves between the ejected gas and surrounding materials.
Hubble was able to snap this photo thanks to its infrared camera. The gas and dust were cloaking the young star, but infrared light can pierce through the diffuse material and allows astronomers to see through the clouds. Over time, the jets disperse the gas clouds completely and the star becomes visible.
Check out the image in all its glory below, or download a high-resolution version at the Hubble website.
ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Padgett (GSFC), T. Megeath (University of Toledo), and B. Reipurth (University of Hawaii)
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