Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Supersonic Jets As Seen by the Humble Space Telescope (WIRED)


Video: Hubble Captures Stars Unleashing Supersonic Jets






Using 14 years’ worth of Hubble Space Telescope images, astronomers have animated the chaos inside supersonic jets of newborn stars.
Hubble took still photographs of the jets from 1994 through 2008, and animators used image-morphing models to create seamless videos that put the jets into motion.
“We’re trying to study how stars form. Just by looking at any one process, you don’t get the full picture,” said astronomer Patrick Hartigan of Rice University, who led a study using the new imagery published July 20 in Astrophysical Journal. “It’s very important to understand [the jets] because that’s how our sun formed, and that’s how planetary systems form. And that’s basically how we got here.”
High-speed jets shoot out of distant pulsars, black holes and other objects across the universe, but the closest ones come from newborn stars within the Milky Way some 1,350 light-years away. George Herbig and Guillermo Haro first spotted these nearby jets in the 1950s, lending them the namesake Herbig-Haro objects. Astronomers have since discovered roughly 400 of them, and more than 100,000 likely exist in the Milky Way alone.
The jets typically appear in pairs and are thought to last no longer than about 100,000 years. Astronomers think the jets originate from a disk of gas and dust around a young star’s equator. When the material spirals onto the stellar surface, the material is flung out of its poles at speeds close to 435,000 mph.

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