Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a variety of intriguing cosmic phenomena.
Surrounded by bright stars, towards the upper middle of the frame we see a small young stellar object
(YSO) known as SSTC2D J033038.2+303212. Located in the constellation of
Perseus, this star is in the early stages of its life and is still
forming into a fully grown star. In this view from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys
(ACS) it appears to have a murky chimney of material emanating outwards
and downwards, framed by bright bursts of gas flowing from the star
itself. This fledgling star is actually surrounded by a bright disc of
material swirling around it as it forms — a disc that we see edge-on
from our perspective.
However, this small bright speck is dwarfed by its cosmic neighbour
towards the bottom of the frame, a clump of bright, wispy gas swirling
around as it appears to spew dark material out into space. The bright
cloud is a reflection nebula known as [B77] 63, a cloud of interstellar
gas that is reflecting light from the stars embedded within it. There
are actually a number of bright stars within [B77] 63, most notably the
emission-line star LkHA 326, and its very near neighbour LZK 18.
These stars are lighting up the surrounding gas and sculpting it into
the wispy shape seen in this image. However, the most dramatic part of
the image seems to be a dark stream of smoke piling outwards from [B77]
63 and its stars — a dark nebula called Dobashi 4173. Dark nebulae are
incredibly dense clouds of pitch-dark material that obscure the patches
of sky behind them, seemingly creating great rips and eerily empty
chunks of sky. The stars speckled on top of this extreme blackness
actually lie between us and Dobashi 4173.
Link
