NASA (North American Space Agency) and ESA (European Special Agency) released this Friday (12) new images that the Hubble telescope captured of celestial clouds that are located about 1,000 light-years from Earth.
The photos are of locations around the Herbig-Haro object HH 505. According to the agencies, these types of objects are luminous regions that surround newborn stars. They are formed when stellar winds or jets of gas expelled by these stars form shock waves when colliding with gas and dust at high speeds.
In the case of Herbig-Haro HH 505, the flows that originated the object come from the star “IX Ori”, located in the region of the Orion Nebula, about 1,000 light-years from Earth.
The agencies explain that this location has intense ultraviolet radiation from young, bright stars. In this region, thousands of stars form and it is considered to be the closest massive star formation site to Earth. Therefore, this is one of the locations most examined by Hubble.
The new images were captured by an advanced camera system (ACS). With this technology, it is possible for astronomers to observe the jets and flows that occur in the region of newborn stars.
Hubble has been scanning the Universe and imaging it for 32 years. At the end of March, the telescope set a new record: it captured the image of the most distant star ever seen. It belongs to a galaxy whose light left there just 900 million years after the Big Bang, the event that gave rise to the Universe as we know it today.
In late 2021, the James Webb was another telescope launched to capture images of the Universe. According to astronomers, the quality of the images captured by him are an indication that we are close to a new moment of space exploration.
