Jets from Young Stars

Astronomers glimpse a detailed look at the fitful, eruptive, and dynamic processes accompanying the final stages of a star's "construction." NASA's Hubble Space Telescope images provide a dramatically clear look at collapsing circumstellar disks of dust and gas that build stars and provide the ingredients for a planetary system. The pictures also show blowtorch-like jets of hot gas funneled from deep within several embryonic systems and machine gun-like bursts of material fired from the stars at speeds of a half-million mph. The Hubble observations shed new light on one of modern astronomy's central questions: How do tenuous clouds of interstellar gas and dust make stars like our Sun.