Pink Tadpole

Credit: ESA/Hub­ble & NASA

Zoom deep into the vast stel­lar nurs­ery of the Orion Neb­ula and a pink tad­pole appears to swim in a misty sea in this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope.

This “tad­pole” is a very young star sur­rounded by the gas from which it formed. The starry cocoon of Herbig-Haro 502 is the left­over mate­r­ial of gas and dust that may form plan­ets in the future. What other sto­ries can you see in this Hub­ble image? Leave us a com­ment below.

Explore the image of this tiny part of the swirling pink and green gas and dust that make up the Orion Neb­ula. Besides the nar­row pink jet of HH 502, look for curved bow shock­waves through­out the image. Young stars throw off gas at very fast speeds. This gas slams into the rel­a­tively calm neb­ula sur­round­ing the star. The shock­waves are like the waves that form off the front of a boat as it speeds through water.

Herbig-Haro objects were first seen by astronomers in the late 19th cen­tury. But it wasn’t until the 1940s when two astronomers, George Her­big and Guillermo Haro, work­ing inde­pen­dently iden­ti­fied the neb­ula as a part of star for­ma­tion. Astronomers believe these com­pact neb­ula offer a view of of how our own solar sys­tem was born more than 4.5 bil­lion years ago. Obser­va­tions like this one from Hub­ble may offer the best glimpses of our solar system’s dis­tant past.