Credit: Roberto Colombari
Found about 1,500 light-years from Earth in the Orion constellation (very close to the Orion Nebula, actually) is a region that doesn't lack in variety or beauty, called
Herbig-Haro 34 (otherwise known as HH-34), it contains numerous nebulae, along with stars that haven't yet entered the main sequence phase of stellar evolution.
These objects are called
Young Stellar Objects (YSO), and they have a propensity for theatrics. Namely, they are known for the complicated jets that spew from their poles, which have an immense effect on the surrounding landscape. With HH34, the jets oppose each other, blasting 'bullets' of gas into space at speeds exceeding 155 miles
(250 kilometers) per second
The frequency at which the supersonic bullet-like mechanism is triggered indicates that the star goes into overdrive when infalling material—most likely originating from within the star's disk—reaches a critical tipping point. Less known, however, is the second most prominent feature (below and to the right of the Bok globule formation, which you can see a closer image of below), called the
Waterfall Nebula (for obvious reasons).
Image Credit: Z. Levay (STScI/AURA/NASA), T.A. Rector (U. Alaska Anchorage) & H. Schweiker (NOAO/AURA/NSF), KPNO, NOAO
From one of our previous APotD write-ups,
"Try as they might, astronomers have little insight into the mechanism that powers the waterfall feature. Many different hypotheses have surfaced in an attempt to explain them. One such hypothesis suggests that
the gas filaments are shaped by stellar winds emanating from a young star that hides within the nearby molecular cloud of Orion, but this is largely believed to be incomplete, as the fainter streams of gas appear to converge on an unusual non-thermal radio source (it can be seen in the upper left)."
"Another hypothesis suggests that, embedded in the gas, there are two unseen objects—like a
neutron star, white dwarf, pulsar or black hole—belonging to a binary system, which keep spitting out jets of radio waves from this region. This too is a little too incomplete to account for other eccentricities, nor does it explain why a binary system doesn't appear to be spewing out large quantities of x-rays in addition to radio waves, which haven’t been detected thus far."
The image up top was allegedly compiled using data from Subaru.
You can find a larger version here.
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기