"Inside the Image // Hubble Space Telescope"
"Herbig–Haro 24"
We have here uh something called a Herbig–Haro object and specifically it's HH 24. Herbig and
Haro made catalogs of of these objects in the sky and they're of interest because
they give us a list of forming star systems. It's in the Orion B molecular cloud complex,
a remarkable area of the sky. These very thick dark clouds that you see on both sides at first
it's it's just a collection of dust and gas. Areas where there's more dust and gas start
pulling in by gravity and eventually this starts collecting into Proto Stars areas of dust and
gas that are going to get enough material to eventually turn into stars, but to do that you
need a nuclear reactor at the center of these stars, you're not talking about fission like
uranium and nuclear power plants on the Earth, you're talking about the ever elusive fusion,
we always want to figure out how to do hydrogen fusion so we have an infinite source of power
and that's because that's what's powering the center of these stars. When you can push
hydrogen atoms together at high enough pressures and temperatures they will fuse together and
create a helium atom. When you do that it emits light in the process then you have a star being
born. And as the they start to turn on you get these jets turning on as the material shoots off
from the magnetic fields and you get a glowing light, which in this case you see coming from
around and behind the clouds so you don't see the central object you do see some objects off
to the side, creating their own jets where the infrared light has gotten through and allowed
us to see a little bit closer around but this Cloud right here surrounding the center of HH 24
is so dense we don't see all the way through. Here we're earlier on in the process the number of
stars forming is still relatively modest and the picture is dominated by the dark clouds that are
enabling the formation but you'd have to come back many millions of years later to have this mostly
converted to Stars it's going to look like this for a while certainly for most of our lifetimes.
"HH24 Orion B Molecular Cloud"
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