NASA has shared a striking image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The image shows a pair of jets spraying outward from a newly born star, formed when an unusually active star spews ionized gas. This strange cosmic phenomenon called a Herbig-Haro object is rare.
Capturing a rare phenomenon
“These spectacular objects develop under very specific circumstances,” Hubble scientists wrote. “Newly formed stars are often very active, and in some cases they expel very narrow jets of rapidly moving ionized gas — gas that is so hot that its molecules and atoms have lost their electrons, making the gas highly charged. The streams of ionized gas then collide with the clouds of gas and dust surrounding newly formed stars at speeds of hundreds of miles per second. It is these energetic collisions that create Herbig-Haro objects such as HH111.”
The space telescope previously captured an even rarer sight, which is a pair of Herbig-Haro objects located in the constellation of Vela (the Sails). Both objects were instrumental in scientists’ understanding what these objects were for the first time. They were previously thought to be emission nebulae. The new kind of object was named for the first two astronomers to study them in detail, George Herbig and Guillermo Haro.
Hubble used infrared wavelength
Hubble used its Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to capture the image. It’s a difficult task to image Herbig-Haro objects because even though they give out a lot of light in the visible wavelength, much of it is absorbed by gas and dust around them. In order to image the object, the WFC3 looked in the infrared wavelength, in which the object is visible, but the light is no longer blocked by dust and gas.
Previously, Hubble used a phenomenon called gravitational lensing to image 4 bright points of galaxies forming a ring. There are actually two galaxies along with a very distant quasar, which is an extremely bright center of a galaxy.
This effect is caused when two galaxies are closer to our planet act as a magnifier on the quasar dubbed 2M1310-1714, which is said to be located 17 billion light-years from Earth.
