Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
Acknowledgements: R. Sahai (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), Serge Meunier
Acknowledgements: R. Sahai (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), Serge Meunier
This new Hubble image shows IRAS 14568-6304, a young star that is
cloaked in a haze of golden gas and dust. It appears to be embedded
within an intriguing swoosh of dark sky, which curves through the image
and obscures the sky behind.
This dark region is known as the Circinus molecular cloud. This cloud
has a mass around 250 000 times that of the Sun, and it is filled with
gas, dust and young stars. Within this cloud lie two prominent and
enormous regions known colloquially to astronomers as Circinus-West and
Circinus-East. Each of these clumps has a mass of around 5000 times that
of the Sun, making them the most prominent star-forming sites in the
Circinus cloud. The clumps are associated with a number of young stellar
objects, and IRAS 14568-6304, featured here under a blurry fog of gas
within Circinus-West, is one of them.
IRAS 14568-6304 is special because it is driving a protostellar jet,
which appears here as the "tail" below the star. This jet is the
leftover gas and dust that the star took from its parent cloud in order
to form. While most of this material forms the star and its accretion
disc — the disc of material surrounding the star, which may one day form
planets — at some point in the formation process the star began to
eject some of the material at supersonic speeds through space. This
phenomenon is not only beautiful, but can also provide us with valuable
clues about the process of star formation.
IRAS 14568-6304 is one of several outflow sources in the
Circinus-West clump. Together, these sources make up one of the
brightest, most massive, and most energetic outflows ever reported.
Scientists have even suggested calling Circinus-West the "nest of
molecular outflows" in tribute to this activity.
A version of this image was entered into the Hubble's Hidden Treasures image processing competition by contestant Serge Meunier.
Source: ESA/Hubble - Space Telescope
