2023-11-30 08:00:00
NASA astronomers used the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument of the Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to photograph the newborn star HH 797 in its “infancy”. Herbig-Haro Object 797 (HH 797), located 1,000 light-years from Earth, is seen in the lower half of this image, near the young open star cluster IC 348. Herbig-Hallo objects (HH objects) are nebula-like objects in the universe formed from newborn stars. Newly born stars continuously eject gas at a speed of nearly hundreds of kilometers per second. These gases will violently collide with the gas and dust clouds around the stars, producing light. The number of individual HH objects or groups of HH objects currently observed exceeds thousands. The image shows the newborn star, called a protostar, ejecting high-speed stellar winds that collide with nearby dust and gas. This collision creates the interaction we can see in the picture. Researchers previously observed from the ground that for the cold molecular gas associated with HH 797, most of the red-shifted gas (moving away from us) is to the south (lower right), while the blue-shifted gas (moving toward us) is to the north (lower left). A gradient is also found in the outflow, such that at a given distance from the young central star, the velocity of gas on the eastern edge of the jet is more red-shifted than the velocity of gas on the western edge. In this higher-resolution Weber image, we can see that what was thought to be one outflow is actually composed of two nearly parallel outflows with their own independent series of shock waves (which explains speed asymmetry). The source is therefore located in the small dark region (lower right of center) and is already known from previous observations, so it is not a single star, but a binary star.
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