It takes millions of years for a star to form but the video above captures part of the process in action. Astronomer Patrick Hartigan and his team from Rice University in Houston, Texas stitched together images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope taken over a period of 14 years. They reveal jets of gas being ejected from three young stars.
The jets may appear sluggish but that's because of our frame of reference.? They are 10,000 times longer than the distance between the Earth and the sun and move at 150 kilometres per second.
The time-lapse starts with a wide-angle view of a jet, named HH 47, bursting out of a star that is hidden in a cloud of gas. The jet creates a bow shockwave that appears on the right as a white blob. The next clip shows the shockwave in close-up.
The next two sequences focus on the HH34 jet and highlight bright regions where material is smashing together and shockwaves are colliding. The final two clips reveal the gas within the HH1 jet moving at different speeds and the shockwave at the top of the HH2 jet grazing the edge of a dense cloud of gas.
According to Hartigan, it's the first time that jets have been observed interacting with their surroundings, which reveals how young stars influence their environment.
"We can now compare observations of the jets with those produced by computer simulations and laboratory experiments to see what aspects of the interactions we understand and what parts we don't," he says.
If you enjoyed this video, you might also like to zoom into the heart of ancient stars or check out our previous Time-lapse Tuesdays.
Journal reference: "Fluid dynamics of stellar jets in real time: Third epoch Hubble Space Telescope images of HH 1, HH 34, and HH 47", Hartigan, P. et al., The Astrophysical Journal, vol 736, p 29, (2011)
slide kate plus 8 warren buffet scud jets words with friends words with friends
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.