This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals unprecedented detail in a newly forming star called HH-30. Exposures taken a year apart show the motion of high speed blobs of gas (arrows) that are being ejected from the star at a half-million miles per hour.
The jets emanate from the center of a dark disk of dust which encircles the star and hides it from view. Presumably the disk feeds material onto the star, and some of it is superheated and squirts out along the star's spin axis. The presence of the blobs suggests that the star formation process is fitful and episodic, as chunks of material fall onto the newborn star.
For the first time, Hubble Space Telescope shows the accretion disk which is about the size of our solar system, around a forming star. The top and bottom surfaces of the disk can be seen directly in this view, which visually confirms the conventional accretion disk theory for star formation. When the star becomes hot enough it will stop accreting material and blow away much of the disk - but perhaps not before planets have formed around the star. The generally accepted theory for the creation of our solar system is that it formed from a disk, and that the orbits of the planet are the "skeletal" remnant of the disk. It also explains why the planets all orbit the Sun in the same direction and roughly the same plane. The disk can be seen to "flare" away from the star. (It is thicker at larger distances from the star.) This behavior can be understood because it takes material farther out in the disk longer to settle to the disk midplane. The flaring has been conjectured in order to explain details of the spectra of such objects, but never directly observed before on these scales.
The picture was taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. HH-30 lies 450 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.
Credits
C. Burrows (STScI & ESA), the WFPC 2 Investigation Definition Team, and NASA;Co-investigators: K. Stapelfeldt (JPL), A Watson (Lowell Observatory)
| About The Object | |
|---|---|
| Object Name | HH-30 |
| R.A. Position | 04h 31m 37.6s |
| Dec. Position | 18° 12' 25.99" |
| About The Object | |
|---|---|
| Object Name | A name or catalog number that astronomers use to identify an astronomical object. |
| Object Description | The type of astronomical object. |
| R.A. Position | Right ascension – analogous to longitude – is one component of an object's position. |
| Dec. Position | Declination – analogous to latitude – is one component of an object's position. |
| Constellation | One of 88 recognized regions of the celestial sphere in which the object appears. |
| Distance | The physical distance from Earth to the astronomical object. Distances within our solar system are usually measured in Astronomical Units (AU). Distances between stars are usually measured in light-years. Interstellar distances can also be measured in parsecs. |
| Dimensions | The physical size of the object or the apparent angle it subtends on the sky. |
| About The Data | |
| Data Description |
|
| Instrument | The science instrument used to produce the data. |
| Exposure Dates | The date(s) that the telescope made its observations and the total exposure time. |
| Filters | The camera filters that were used in the science observations. |
| About The Image | |
| Image Credit | The primary individuals and institutions responsible for the content. |
| Publication Date | The date and time the release content became public. |
| Color Info | A brief description of the methods used to convert telescope data into the color image being presented. |
| Orientation | The rotation of the image on the sky with respect to the north pole of the celestial sphere. |
