When the stars “eat” too much material in too short a time, they respond by sending out two-sided jets along the opposite axis, settling down the star’s spin, and removing mass from the area. The stars’ more recent ejections appear in a thread-like blue, running along the angled diffraction spike that covers the orange lobes.Īctively forming stars ingest the gas and dust that immediately surrounds them in a disk (imagine an edge-on circle encasing them). The two-sided orange lobes were created by earlier ejections from these stars. Targets like this also give researchers insight into how stars gather mass over time, potentially allowing them to model how our own Sun, a low-mass star, formed. Stars take millions of years to fully form. Herbig-Haro 46/47 is an important object to study because it is relatively young – only a few thousand years old. They are surrounded by a disk of gas and dust that continues to add to their mass. The stars are buried deeply, appearing as an orange-white splotch. Look for them at the center of the red diffraction spikes. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured a tightly bound pair of actively forming stars, known as Herbig-Haro 46/47, in high-resolution near-infrared light. These stars have a lot of energy to let loose! All across the image, the background is filled with tiny stars with miniature diffractions spikes, circular and spiral galaxies in whites and pinks, and tiny red dots that represent the most distant galaxies. Other larger blue stars dot the scene, but their diffraction spikes are less than half or a quarter of the size. To the bottom right of the central red star with prominent diffraction spikes are two large foreground stars that have large blue diffraction spikes. Along the right and bottom edge, the nebula appears in a soft orange outline, like a backward L. It extends toward the top and fades to the left, not extending beyond the left lobe. A thin, undulating blue line runs from the central stars through the right lobe, and a fainter one is partially covered by the red diffraction spike.Ī delicate, semi-transparent blue cloud known as a nebula covers the majority of the orange lobes, but ends in a light orange line about halfway before the end of the right lobe.
Just off the edge of this lobe, also fully separated, is a slightly smaller orange sponge-like blob. The right lobe is thinner overall, and ends in a smaller orange semi-circle that has a faint purple outline. Just off the edge of this lobe is a tiny red arc that curves in the opposite direction and is fully separated from the lobe. Overall, this lobe is more continuous, though there’s an absence of matter toward the bottom center. The orange lobe to the left is fatter, ending in a rounder edge. At the middle of the diffraction spikes is a yellow-white blob, which hides two tightly orbiting stars. The smaller, fainter diffraction spikes in the center are aligned at a true horizontal, but one set of the longer, more opaque spikes run along the orange cloud.
The vertical spikes extend almost to the top and bottom of the frame. At its center is a set of very large red-and-pink diffraction spikes in Webb’s eight-pointed pattern. It takes up about two-thirds of the length of this angle, but is thin at the opposite angle. At the center is a thin horizontal orange cloud known as Herbig-Haro 46/47 that is uneven with rounded ends, and tilted from bottom left to top right.
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