Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Bright young star shoots out strange fan of material in Hubble image

By

The lifecycle of stars is dramatic, from the collapsing of clouds of dust and gas under gravitational pressures to form protostars, to the explosive end of massive stars which erupt as supernovae. Massive stars heavier than our sun are particularly dramatic, eventually puffing up to become red supergiants as they come to the ends of their lives before finishing up as black holes or neutron stars. But massive stars can go through epic changes when they are in their younger years as well, as this week’s image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows.

The image is of a bright, young, massive star surrounded by a stunning structure of dust and gas. The object is called IRAS 05506+2414, and is located more than 9,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Taurus. And its swirling shape seems to have been created by a disruptive event in the life of this young star.

A shroud of thick gas and dust surrounds a bright young star.
A shroud of thick gas and dust surrounds a bright young star in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 inspected a young stellar object, over 9,000 light-years away in the constellation Taurus, to help astronomers understand the earliest stages in the lives of massive stars. This object – which is known to astronomers as IRAS 05506+2414 – may be an example of an explosive event caused by the disruption of a massive young star system. ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Sahai

“The swirling discs of material surrounding a young star are usually funneled into twin outflows of gas and dust from the star,” Hubble scientists write. “In the case of IRAS 05506+2414, however, a fan-like spray of material traveling at velocities of up to 217 miles per second (350 km per second) is spreading outwards from the center of this image.”

Recommended Videos

According to a paper from 2008, the outflows of material in IRAS 05506+2414 could be similar to the “bullets” of gas seen shooting out of the Orion nebula. These bullets appear small from a distance, but are actually around the size of our solar system and are zipping away from the center of the nebula at a tremendous speed of 250 miles or 400 kilometers per second. First seen in 1983, the Orion bullets remain something of a mystery, though they are brightly visible in images because the iron atoms at the tips of each bullet get so hot from the friction of their movements that they glow due to their 5000°C (9,000°F) temperatures.

Related

The case of IRAS 05506+2414 is unusual, according to another paper from 2017, because other young stars throw out twin jets of materials like those seen in Herbig-Haro objects. The fans of material given off by this star are very different and scientists are still researching how the star system could have been disrupted to cause this result.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Hubble goes hunting for elusive medium-sized black holes
A Hubble Space Telescope image of the globular star cluster, Messier 4. The cluster is a dense collection of several hundred thousand stars. Astronomers suspect that an intermediate-mass black hole, weighing as much as 800 times the mass of our Sun, is lurking, unseen, at its core.

There's something odd about the black holes discovered to date. We've found plenty of smaller black holes, with masses less than 100 times that of the sun, and plenty of huge black holes, with masses millions or even billions of times that of the sun. But we've found hardly any black holes in the intermediate mass range, arguably not enough to confirm that they even exist, and it's not really clear why.

Now, astronomers are using the Hubble Space Telescope to hunt for these missing black holes. Hubble has previously found some evidence of black holes in this intermediate range, and now it is being used to search for examples within a few thousand light-years of Earth.

Read more
Image of darkness and light shows new stars being born in Lupus 3 nebula
The two young, low-mass proto-stars HR 5999 and HR 6000 illuminate nearby dust, creating the reflection nebula Bernes 149. These stars grew out of the dusty dark cloud of Lupus 3, part of a larger complex of as many as nine dark clouds.

A gorgeous new image of a nebular 500 light-years away gives a peek into the process of star formation.

This image from the Dark Energy Camera shows both the dark cloud of Lupus 3 and the shining bright young stars of the nebula Bernes 149. The dark cloud here is essential to the star formation process, as it is a collection of gas and dust which provides the building blocks for new stars to be born. Known as a dark nebula because of its density, Lupus 3 obscures the light of the stars behind it, giving the impression of a swath of black across the starry sky.

Read more
1 million images get stitched together to form an atlas of star birth
This image shows the IRAS 11051-7706 object in the Chamaeleon constellation. New stars are born in the colourful clouds of gas and dust seen here. The infrared observations underlying the image reveal new details in the star-forming regions that are usually obscured by the clouds of dust. The image was produced with data collected by the VIRCAM instrument, which is attached to the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The observations were done as part of the VISIONS survey, which will allow astronomers to better understand how stars form in these dust-enshrouded regions.

Stars are born in dense clouds of dust and gas called, adorably enough, stellar nurseries. These nurseries can be vast, spreading over 1,000 light-years across, and can produce thousands of baby stars. In order to study these busy, exciting regions, astronomers have put together thousands of images to create mosaics of five nearby nurseries, producing an atlas of star birth.

The researchers used images from the European Southern Observatory's Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), stitching together five years of observations to show regions like the L1688 region in the Ophiuchus constellation and the IRAS 11051-7706 and HH 909 A objects in the Chamaeleon constellation.

Read more