NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured a rare celestial phenomenon known as a Herbig-Haro object. This amazing object, named HH111, was imaged using the telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), and only develops under very specific circumstances. More specifically, they occur when newly formed stars expel very narrow jets of rapidly moving ionized gas, making the gas highly charged.
These streams of highly charged ionized gas then collide with the remnants of newly formed stars at speeds of hundreds of miles per second, resulting in energetic collisions that create Herbig-Haro objects such as HH111. Hubble’s WFC3 captures images at optical, ultraviolet, and infrared wavelengths, or a wavelength range similar to the range that human eyes are sensitive to (optical, or visible) and a range of wavelengths that are slightly too short (ultraviolet) or too long (infrared) to be detected by them.
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Herbig-Haro objects actually release a lot of light at optical wavelengths, but they are difficult to observe because their surrounding dust and gas absorb much of the visible light. Therefore, the WFC3’s ability to observe at infrared wavelengths – where observations are not as affected by gas and dust – is crucial to observing Herbo-Haro objects successfully, said NASA.
