File:HH 47 HH 34 and HH 2.jpg

Original file (2,764 × 2,398 pixels, file size: 1.8 MB, MIME type: image/jpeg)

Summary

Description
English: The glowing, clumpy streams of material shown in these NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images are the signposts of star birth.

Ejected episodically by young stars like cannon salvos, the blobby material zips along at more than 700 000 kilometres per hour. The speedy jets are confined to narrow beams by the powerful stellar magnetic field. Called Herbig-Haro or HH objects, these outflows have a bumpy ride through space.

When fast-moving blobs collide with slower-moving gas, bow shocks arise as the material heats up. Bow shocks are glowing waves of material similar to waves produced by the bow of a ship ploughing through water.

In HH 2, at lower right, several bow shocks can be seen where several fast-moving clumps have bunched up like cars in a traffic jam. In HH 34, at lower left, a grouping of merged bow shocks reveals regions that brighten and fade over time as the heated material cools where the shocks intersect.

In HH 47, at top, the blobs of material look like a string of cars on a crowded motorway, which ends in a chain-reaction accident. The smash up creates the bow shock, left.

These images are part of a series of time-lapse movies astronomers have made showing the outflows’ motion over time. The movies were stitched together from images taken over a 14-year period by Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. Hubble followed the jets over three epochs: HH 2 from 1994, 1997, and 2007; HH 34 from 1994, 1998, and 2007; and HH 47 from 1994, 1999, and 2008.

The outflows are roughly 1350 light-years from Earth. HH 34 and HH 2 reside near the Orion Nebula, in the northern sky. HH 47 is located in the southern constellation of Vela.
Date
Source http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1113a/
Author NASA, ESA, and P. Hartigan (Rice University)
Other versions
Time-evolution of HH 47

Licensing

w:en:Creative Commons
attribution
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
You are free:
  • to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
  • to remix – to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
  • attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

Captions

Herbig-haro objects

Items portrayed in this file

depicts

31 August 2011

image/jpeg

File history

Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time.

Date/TimeThumbnailDimensionsUserComment
current16:12, 31 August 2011Thumbnail for version as of 16:12, 31 August 20112,764 × 2,398 (1.8 MB)Jmencisom

The following 3 pages use this file:

Global file usage

The following other wikis use this file:

Metadata