The fingerprint of a new star

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

Ener­getic blasts of glow­ing gas are the fin­ger­prints of a new star in this image from the NASA/ESA Hub­ble Space Telescope.

Explore the high-speed jets of HH 34. What sto­ries or pic­tures do you see? Leave a note below.

Herbig-Haro objects are short-lived phases of new star for­ma­tion. They last about 100,000 years and were first described by astronomers George Her­big and Guillermo Haro in the 1950s. Stars form from cold col­laps­ing cloud of hydro­gen gas and dust. As more and more mate­r­ial gath­ers in this neb­ula, it grows warm and begins to spin. Grav­ity pulls more mate­r­ial in this spin­ning disk toward the cen­ter where it might reach tem­per­a­tures that will fuse hydro­gen atoms together. When this hap­pens, a star is born.

But astronomers are still puz­zled why new stars send jets rip­ping through their neb­u­lar birth­place. Sci­en­tists think that the disk mate­r­ial grad­u­ally spi­rals onto the star to be blasted out­ward along the star’s axis and focused by the star’s intense mag­netic field. As astronomers watch jets expand over time, they see knots of fast-moving mate­r­ial col­lide with slow-moving blobs. When this hap­pens shock­waves like the waves in front of a boat form. These bow shocks brighten as the gas is heated up. HH 34 shows many over­lap­ping bow shocks.

HH 34 lies near the Orion Neb­ula about 1,350 light-years from Earth.