Young stars are rambunctious!
Young stars are rambunctious!
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the “antics” of a pair of actively forming young stars, known as Herbig-Haro 46/47, in high-resolution near-infrared light. To find them, trace the bright pink and red diffraction spikes until you hit the center: The stars are within the orange-white splotch. They are buried deeply in a disk of gas and dust that feeds their growth as they continue to gain mass. The disk is not visible, but its shadow can be seen in the two dark, conical regions surrounding the central stars.
The most striking details are the two-sided lobes that fan out from the actively forming central stars, represented in fiery orange. Much of this material was shot out from those stars as they repeatedly ingest and eject the gas and dust that immediately surround them over thousands of years.
When material from more recent ejections runs into older material, it changes the shape of these lobes. This activity is like a large fountain being turned on and off in rapid, but random succession, leading to billowing patterns in the pool below it. Some jets send out more material and others launch at faster speeds. Why? It’s likely related to how much material fell onto the stars at a particular point in time.
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Image: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured a tightly bound pair of actively forming stars, known as Herbig-Haro 46/47, in high-resolution near-infrared light. Look for them at the center of the red diffraction spikes, appearing as an orange-white splotch. Herbig-Haro 46/47 is an important object to study because it is relatively young – only a few thousand years old. Star systems take millions of years to fully form. Targets like this give researchers insight into how much mass stars gather over time, potentially allowing them to model how our own Sun, which is a low-mass star, formed – along with its planetary system. (Credits: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA. Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))
