NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has once again wowed people with an amazing view of the vibrant celestial nebula in the Orion Nebula. The telescope has captured the colorful region around newborn stars – Herbig-Haro object HH 505. According to Nasa, the Herbig-Haro object is a rare nebula that occurs when stellar winds or jets of gas ejected from a newborn star collide with the gas and dust around it at hundreds of miles per second, resulting in luminous shock waves. In HH 505, these outflows erupt from the star IX Ori, which lies on the outskirts of the Orion Nebula about 1000 light-years from Earth.
In the image taken by Hubble, the burst of gas and dust appears distorted into sinuous curves due to its collision with the large-scale flow of gas and dust from the core of the Orion Nebula. The image was taken using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). As NASA shares, the Orion Nebula is filled with intense UV radiation from bright young stars. Not only has Hubble successfully captured the shock waves formed by the outflows, but slower-moving streams of stellar material are also highlighted by this radiation. This allows astronomers to study jets and outflows directly.
What is the Orion Nebula?
The Orion Nebula is a dynamic region of dust and gas where thousands of stars are forming. It is the closest massive star-forming region to Earth, and as such, has been a frequent target for the Hubble Space Telescope.
A few days ago, Hubble treated skygazers to a stunning view of the globular star cluster NGC 6638 in the constellation Sagittarius. NASA sharing the image said, “The stargazing highlights the density of stars at the heart of globular clusters, which are stable, tightly bound groups of tens of thousands to millions of stars.” The image was captured by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3.
