New telescope sees dramatic star birth in spectacular closeup

Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory recently pointed one of their newest telescopes at a newly-formed star and captured spectacular images of glowing jets of gas —named Herbig-Haro 46/47 — being thrown off from the newborn.

The images come from ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, and they show off the stunning details of these two gas jets — called Herbig-Haro objects — which are thrown off from the poles of the star when it forms. When the jets run into the clouds of gas surrounding the star, the collisions cause the gases to glow. The colours that we'd see from these objects depend on what gases are in the jets. However, in this case, ALMA is a radio telescope, so it's seeing the colours based on what direction the gases are traveling. The blue-glowing gas is coming towards us, and the red-glowing gas is headed away from us.

One of the really cool things about this, is that you can actually see these gas jets moving. You can watch 14 years worth of observations by clicking here.

This newborn star is located around 1,400 light years away (so although we only witnessed its birth recently, it's actually been around for a long time!). Here's a video that the ESO put together showing a zoom-in view:

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This isn't the first time astronomers have seen this particular baby star and its massive jets of gas. The Spitzer Space Telescope has snapped pictures of it before (here's ones from 2003 and from 2007). However, the latest images from ALMA show how truly powerful this new telescope is, and it's not even finished yet!

"The detail in the Herbig-Haro 46/47 images is stunning," said Stuartt Corder, a project scientist at the Joint ALMA Observatory and co-author on the new paper on this star, according to an ESO statement. "Perhaps more stunning is the fact that, for these types of observations, we really are still in the early days. In the future ALMA will provide even better images than this in a fraction of the time."

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