WASHINGTON, Dec. 17 (UPI) — Even the Hubble Space Telescope is getting wrapped up in the Star Wars hype.
On Thursday, Hubble shared a new image of a cosmic double-sided lightsaber, complete with a description ripe with references to the famed fictional galaxy.
The lightsaber is actually two streams of high-energy particles being emitted by a newly born star. The star is obscured by clouds of gas and dust, but the interaction between its stellar energy and the surrounding cosmic structures make for compelling viewing.
The star is located in a molecular cloud complex called Orion B, situated 1350 light-years away in the constellation of Orion, commonly known as “The Hunter.”
Newly born stars, or protostars, acquire a swirling disc of material pulled in by its gravity. These disks can eventually become protoplanetary disks, home to planet formation. But in their earliest iterations, stellar disks work mostly to feed the hunger of a growing star.
As more and more material condenses in the disk, the star gains energy and begins to shoot out energized gas from its swirling poles.
The jets interact with the surrounding gas and dust to create shock waves, carving out empty space among the clouds and encouraging cosmic material to stretch out in branches oriented with the star’s rotational axis.
“The Force is strong with these twin jets; their effect on their environment demonstrates the true power of the Dark Side with a blast stronger than one from a fully armed and operational Death Star battle station,” Hubble astronomers explained in a press release.
These swirling shapes created by the interactions between intense stellar energy and shifting clouds of gas and dust — often called nebulosity — form what are called Herbig-Haro objects.
The Herbig-Haro object featured in the new lightsaber image is called HH 24.
Herbig-Haro objects don’t last long, just a few thousand years — a blink of the eye is space time. As the excited material gets pushed farther away from the newborn star, it will begin to interact with neighboring clouds of gas and dust moving through interstellar space.
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