Newborn Stars and Scorpions

Credit: NASA, ESA, and P. Har­ti­gan (Rice University)

This fiery star birth announce­ment resem­bles a scor­pion in this image from the NASA/ESA Hub­ble Space Telescope.

Explore the cloud of ener­getic glow­ing gas sur­round­ing this young star known as HH 2. What sto­ries or pic­tures do you see in this image? Leave a note below.

These short-lived and small events are just at the edge of Hubble’s vision so there’s not much to zoom on. There’s plenty of action going on in this small space. Jets of mate­r­ial are blast­ing away from the new­born star at high-speed. They last only about 100,000 years. Astronomers call them Herbig-Haro (HH) objects in honor of George Her­big and Guillermo Haro, who stud­ied them in the 1950s.

Stars form from col­laps­ing clouds of hydro­gen gas. Grav­ity pulls the mate­r­ial together into a spin­ning mass. When enough gath­ers in one place, a star may form as hydro­gen atoms begin to fuse giv­ing off light and heat. Plan­ets may arise from the left­over mate­r­ial in the disk sur­round­ing the new­born star. Mate­r­ial in the disk may also spi­ral toward the star only to be spewed out along the nar­row beams of the star’s pow­er­ful mag­netic field. Astronomers have been watch­ing these jets over the past 14 years and have cre­ated movies as the jets flow out­ward like water.

It remains a mys­tery why a star unleashes the jets or what role they play in star for­ma­tion. Study­ing the jets pro­vides a peek at how our Sun formed more than 4.5 bil­lion years ago.

HH2 and other Herbig-Haro objects are found about 1,350 light-years from Earth in the Orion Neb­ula.