NASA / ESA
Dual particle beams light up a star-forming object in the Orion B cloud complex. Courtesy NASA and the European Space Agency
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University of Hawaii astronomer Bo Reipurth received acknowledgement Sunday for NASA’s daily featured photograph.
Reipurth, a specialist in stellar formation with the UH Institute for Astronomy, took credit with two other scientists for a photo of a newborn star in the Milky Way.
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, known in the stargazing community as APOD, the image was created in December 2015 from data from the Hubble Space Telescope.
“This might look like a double-bladed lightsaber, but these two cosmic jets actually beam outward from a newborn star in a galaxy near you,” the accompanying caption says. The tableau spans about half a light-year across a jet known as Herbig-Haro 24, some 1,300 light-years away in the stellar nurseries of the Orion B molecular cloud complex.
Hidden from direct view, HH 24’s central protostar is surrounded by cold dust and gas flattened into a rotating accretion disk, according to NASA. As material from the disk falls toward the young stellar object, it heats up to thousands of degrees Fahrenheit.
Opposing jets are blasted out along the system’s rotation axis. Cutting through the region’s interstellar matter, the narrow, energetic jets produce a series of glowing shock fronts along their path.
Sharing credit with Reipurth are Deborah Padgett of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and Tom Megeath of the University of Toledo.