A pair of jets of very hot gas protrude outwards in perfect symmetry in this striking image of the Herbig-Haro (HH) object HH 24, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
The two streams crossing the image are jets of hot gas, ejected from the poles of a protostar. If the jets collide with the surrounding gas and dust they can clear vast spaces, and create curved shock waves, seen as knotted clumps called Herbig-Haro objects. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / D. Padgett, GSFC / T. Megeath, University of Toledo / B. Reipurth, University of Hawaii.
HH 24 lies in the constellation of Orion in the Orion B molecular cloud complex. It is about 1,350 light-years away, not far from another Herbig-Haro object known as HH 34.
The object has a very complicated appearance that includes two opposite jets that ram into the surrounding interstellar material.
This structure is produced by a machine-gun-like blast of ‘bullets’ of very hot gas ejected from a protostar at high velocities.
This seems to indicate that the protostar experiences episodic ‘outbursts’ when large chunks of material fall onto it from a surrounding disc.
Just to the right of the star, a couple of bright points of light can be seen. These are infant stars peeking through and showing off their own faint lightsabers.
One hidden, cloaked source, only detectable in the radio part of the spectrum, has blasted a tunnel through the dark cloud in the upper left of the image with a wider outflow.
All these jets make HH 24 the densest concentration of HH jets known in such a small region. Half of the HH jets have been discovered in this region in visible light, and about the same number in the infrared.
The image is a composite of separate exposures acquired by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2).
This image shows the Herbig-Haro object HH 24 and the surrounding sky as it is seen from the ground. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Digitized Sky Survey 2 / Davide De Martin.
Several filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter.
