This strange cosmic phenomenon is a rare sight called Herbig Haro.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, WASHINGTON — The Hubble telescope has captured an image of a star giving off a burst of gas. The image shared by the American Space Agency (NASA) this week is of a pair of beams gushing out of a newborn star. This scene is formed when an unusually active star emits streams of ionized gas.
Reported from Digital Trend, Monday (6/9), this strange-looking cosmic phenomenon is a rare sight called the Herbig-Haro object (HH111). Hubble scientists say this spectacular object evolved under very specific circumstances.
Newly formed stars are often very active. In some cases they emit a very narrow beam of fast-moving ionized gas—a gas that is so hot that the molecules and atoms lose their electrons, making the gas highly charged.
“The ionized gas stream then collides with the gas and dust cloud surrounding the newly formed star at hundreds of miles per second. It is this energetic collision that creates Herbig-Haro objects like HH111,” said Hubble Scientist.
The Hubble Telescope has previously imaged a rarer sight, a pair of Herbig-Haro objects located in the constellation Vela. The two objects played an important role in astronomers’ understanding of this object for the first time, because it was previously thought to be an emission nebula. The new object class is named for the first two astronomers to study it in depth, George Herbig and Guillermo Haro.
To capture the image, Hubble used the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). It’s hard to imagine Herbig-Haro objects because although they give off a lot of light in the visible wavelengths, much of this light is absorbed by the surrounding dust and gas.
So to photograph an object, WFC3 looks at infrared wavelengths, where the object is still shining, but the light is no longer blocked by dust.
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