NASA Hubble Movies: Provide Unprecedented View of Supersonic Jets From Young Stars

The glowing, clumpy streams of material shown in these NASA Hubble Space Telescope images are the signposts of star birth. Called Herbig-Haro or HH objects, these outflows speed along at over 440,000 miles an hour.

When they "rear-end" slower gas, bow shocks (the blue features) arise as the material heats up.

In HH 2 (lower right) several bow shocks (the compact blue and white features) occur where fast-moving clumps bunch up. In HH 34 (lower left) a grouping of merged bow shocks reveals regions that brighten and fade over time as the heated material cools, shown in red, where the shocks intersect.

In HH 47 (top) a long jet of material has burst out of a dark cloud of gas and dust that hides the newly forming star. Credit: NASA/ESA/P. Hartigan (Rice University)

New movies created from years of still images collected by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope provide new details about the stellar birthing process, showing energetic jets of glowing gas ejected from young stars in unprecedented detail.

The jets are a byproduct of gas accretion around newly forming stars and shoot off at supersonic speeds of about 100 miles per second in opposite directions through space.

These phenomena are providing clues about the final stages of a star's birth, offering a peek at how our Sun came into existence 4.5 billion years ago.

Hubble's unique sharpness allows astronomers to see changes in the jets over just a few years' time. Most astronomical processes change over timescales that are much longer than a human lifetime.

A team of scientists led by astronomer Patrick Hartigan of Rice University in Houston, Texas, collected enough high-resolution Hubble images over a 14-year period to stitch together time-lapse movies of the jets ejected from three young stars

NASA Hubble story