Credit: NASA & ESA.Acknowledgements: Kevin Luhman (Pennsylvania State University), and Judy Schmidt
This striking new image, captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space
Telescope, reveals a star in the process of forming within the
Chamaeleon cloud. This young star is throwing off narrow streams of gas
from its poles — creating this ethereal object known as HH 909A. These
speedy outflows collide with the slower surrounding gas, lighting up the
region.
When new stars form, they gather material hungrily from the space
around them. A young star will continue to feed its huge appetite until
it becomes massive enough to trigger nuclear fusion reactions in its
core, which light the star up brightly.
Before this happens, new stars undergo a phase during which they
violently throw bursts of material out into space. This material is
ejected as narrow jets that streak away into space at breakneck speeds
of hundreds of kilometres per second, colliding with nearby gas and dust
and lighting up the region. The resulting narrow, patchy regions of
faintly glowing nebulosity are known as Herbig-Haro objects. They are
very short-lived structures, and can be seen to visibly change and
evolve over a matter of years (heic1113) — just the blink of an eye on astronomical timescales.
These structures are very common within star-forming regions like the
Orion Nebula, or the Chameleon I molecular cloud — home to the subject
of this image. The Chameleon cloud is located in the southern
constellation of Chameleon, just over 500 light-years from Earth.
Astronomers have found numerous Herbig-Haro objects embedded in this
stellar nursery, most of them emanating from stars with masses similar
to that of the Sun. A few are thought to be tied to less massive objects
such as brown dwarfs, which are "failed" stars that did not hit the
critical mass to spark reactions in their centres.
A version of this image was entered into the Hubble's Hidden Treasures image processing competition by contestant Judy Schmidt.
Source: ESA/ HUBBLE - Space Telescope
