The image, taken with the NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows HH46 and HH47, two Herbig-Haro objects , small-scale collision regions associated with newborn stars, located 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Vela.
Herbig-Haro objects were first observed in the 19th century by American astronomer Sherburne Wesley Burnham, but the first astronomers to study them in detail were George Herbig and Guillermo Haro, after whom they are named.
These objects are transient phenomena that move away from the star that created them, at a speed of up to 250,000 km / h and disappear into nothingness in a few tens of thousands of years.
“Before their discovery in 1977 by the American astronomer RD Schwartz, the exact mechanism by which these multicolored objects formed was unknown,” said the Hubble astronomers. “Before 1997, Schwartz and others theorized that the objects could be a type of reflection nebula or a type of shock wave formed by gas emitted by a star interacting with surrounding matter.”
“The mystery was finally solved when a protostar, invisible in this image , was discovered in the center of the long jets of matter, ” the experts add. “The outflows of matter, about 10 light years across, were ejected from the newborn star and propelled violently at speeds of more than 150 km / s . Upon reaching the surrounding gas, the collision created the bright shock waves seen here. “
Reference: NASA
