Key Highlights
- Hubble Space Telescope captures colorful celestial cloudscape surrounding HH 505.
- The Orion Nebula is teeming with intense ultraviolet radiation from bright newly formed stars.
The Hubble Space Telescope from NASA captures the colorful, vibrant celestial cloudscape surrounding the Herbig-Haro object HH 505.
Luminous regions surrounding newborn stars, Herbig-Haro objects are formed when stellar winds or jets of gas spewing from these newborn stars create shockwaves colliding with nearby gas and dust at high speeds.
The outflows are visible as gracefully curving structures at the top and bottom of the captured image. They are distorted into sinuous curves by interacting with the large-scale dust and gas flow from the Orion Nebula’s core. With HH 505, these outflows originate from the star IX Ori, which lies on the outskirts of the Orion Nebula around 1000 light-years away from the planet Earth.
Captured with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) of the Hubble Space Telescope, an observation was made by astronomers studying the properties of outflows and protoplanetary discs. The Orion Nebula is teeming with intense UV radiation from bright newborn stars.
The shockwaves formed by the outflows are brightly visible to Hubble, but this radiation also highlights the slower-moving currents of stellar material. That allows astronomers to observe jets and outflows directly and learn more about their structures.
The Orion Nebula is a dynamic region of dust and gas where thousands of stars are forming and is the closest region of massive star formation to Earth. Hence, it is one of the most scrutinized areas of the night sky and has frequently been a target for the Hubble Space Telescope.
This observation was also part of a fascinating Hubble mosaic of the Orion Nebula, which combined 520 ACS images in five different colors to create the sharpest view ever taken of the region.
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