By ESA/Hubble, August 8, 2022
Hubble Space Telescope captures the colorful region around the object Herbig-Haro HH 505. Courtesy: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Bally, Credit: MH Özsaraç
This vivid sky cloudscape from NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope captures the colorful region around the Herbig-Harro object HH 505. Glowing regions around newborn stars, Herbig-Harro objects form when stellar winds or jets of gas ejected from these newborns form. stars shock waves colliding with nearby gas and dust at high speeds. In the case of HH 505, these outflows originate from the star IX Ori, which lies on the outskirts of the Orion Nebula about 1,000 light-years from Earth. The leaks themselves are visible as gracefully curved structures at the top and bottom of this image. They are twisted into sinuous curves by their interaction with the large-scale flow of gas and dust from the core of the Orion Nebula.
Taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), this observation was made by astronomers studying the properties of outflows and protoplanetary disks. The Orion Nebula is teeming with intense ultraviolet radiation from bright young stars. The shock waves formed by the outflows are clearly visible to Hubble, but slower-moving streams of stellar material are also highlighted by this radiation. This allows astronomers to directly observe jets and outflows and learn more about their structures.
The Orion Nebula is a cavern of turbulent gas and dust where thousands of stars form. The energy released by the young stars transforms their place of birth, shattering their surroundings into fantastic shapes. Courtesy: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (STScI/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team
The Orion Nebula is a dynamic region of dust and gas where thousands of stars are forming and is the closest massive star forming region to Earth. As a result, it is one of the most closely studied regions of the night sky and has often been a target for the Hubble Space Telescope. This sighting was also part of Hubble’s stunning mosaic (see above) of the Orion Nebula, which combined 520 ACS images in five different colors to create the clearest view ever taken of the region.
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