Hubble Space Telescope releases new image of Orion Nebula

The Orion Nebula looks like a fluffy cloud on a dark space background

Republica.co.id, National World News – One of the most beautiful and spectacular regions of the night sky can be found in the constellation Orion. A very thick cloud of interstellar dust and gas floats between the stars Alnitak, Saif, and Rigel.

reported from Science AlertOn Sunday (August 14, 2022), here is the Orion Nebula, the material lair where baby stars are born and one of the most studied and photographed objects in the Milky Way.

Spanning 24 light-years, it is so close and so large that it is visible to the naked eye. Because of their relative proximity (about 1,344 light-years from the Sun), these spectacular clouds are an important laboratory for understanding star formation.

All you have to do is zoom in and take a closer look at the details. This newly released Hubble image of the Orion Nebula looks like a fluffy cloud of color against a velvety dark background. But at the center is a rare and beautiful cosmic touch, powered by the baby star IX Ori.

The contact, called HH 505, is known as the Herbig-Haro object. Creating them requires very special conditions.

First, you need a child star. It forms when a dense node in a molecular cloud, such as the Orion stellar nursery, spins and collapses under its own mass. As it spins, it absorbs material from the surrounding clouds, allowing the baby star to grow.

Because this material forms in baby stars, powerful jets of plasma can be launched from the star’s poles. It is thought that some of the matter orbiting the star is transferred to the poles along the star’s external magnetic field lines. These magnetic field lines act as particle accelerators, so when matter reaches the poles, it can be fired at incredible speeds.

As this beam travels at breakneck speed, it slams into the surrounding gas, heating it up so that it glows, creating a Herbig-Haro object. This creates what looks like two glowing rods emanating from baby stars.

These structures change rapidly, so astronomers can study them to understand how baby stars move material through the clouds around them. This cuts off the supply of gas and dust that feeds growing stars and determines the size of mature stars.