By ESA/Hubble August 8, 2022
The Hubble Space Telescope captures the colorful region surrounding the object Herbig-Haro HH 505. Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA, J. Bally, Credit: MH Özsaraç
This vibrant celestial cloudscape from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures the colorful region surrounding Herbig-Haro object HH 505. Bright regions surrounding newborn stars, Herbig-Haro objects form when they form stellar winds or jets of gas that pick off these newborn stars. shock waves that collide with nearby gas and dust at high speed. In the case of HH 505, these outflows come from the star IX Ori, which lies on the outskirts of the Orion Nebula about 1000 light-years from Earth. The same outflows are visible as gracefully curved structures at the top and bottom of this image. They are distorted into sinuous curves by their interaction with the large-scale flow of gas and dust in the core of the Orion Nebula.
Captured 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 filled with intense ultraviolet radiation from bright young stars. The shock waves formed by the outflows are highly visible to Hubble, but slower streams of stellar material are also highlighted by this radiation. This allows astronomers to directly observe the jets and outflows and learn more about their structures.
The Orion Nebula is a cavern of tumultuous gas and dust where thousands of stars are forming. The energy released by young stars transforms their birthplace, whipping their surroundings into fantastical shapes. Credits: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (STScI/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasure 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 examined areas of the night sky and has been a frequent target for the Hubble Space Telescope. This observation was also part of a fascinating Hubble mosaic (see above) of the Orion Nebula, which combined 520 ACS images in five different colors to create the sharpest view ever taken of the region.