The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a group of five Herbig-Haro objects — tiny patches of nebulosity associated with newborn stars — within NGC 1333, a reflection nebula located in the constellation of Perseus, about 1,000 light-years away from Earth.
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the reflection nebula NGC 1333 and associated Herbig-Haro objects. The picture was snapped by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The image was made through two filters. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / K. Stapelfeldt.
Herbig-Haro objects were first observed in the 19th century by the American astronomer Sherburne Wesley Burnham, but were not recognized as being a distinct type of emission nebula until the 1940s.
The first astronomers to study them in detail were George Herbig and Guillermo Haro, after whom they have been named.
Herbig-Haro objects are transient phenomena — traveling away from the star that created them, at a speed of up to 155,000 mph (250,000 km per hour) they disappear into nothingness within a few tens of thousands of years.
The young star that is the source of Herbig-Haro objects numbered 7 to 11 (visible in blue in the top center of the Hubble image) is called SVS 13 and all five objects are moving away from the star toward the upper left.
The current distance between HH 7 and SVS 13 is about 20,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
Herbig-Haro objects are formed when jets of ionized gas ejected by a young star collide with nearby clouds of gas and dust at high speeds.
HH 7-11 are no exception to this and were formed when the jets from the newborn star SVS 13 collided with the surrounding clouds.
These collisions created the five brilliant clumps of light within the reflection nebula NGC 1333.
