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If you have ever been a parent, when your child is a newborn, you are aware of bipolar flow, whether you know the term or not. That's when you have two streams of material (it can be in different states, and oh boy can that is) ejected from a single object in opposite directions.
For a new parent, it's unpleasant (in many cases, it's unclear exactly how it's going for the baby), but in other circumstances it may be fine.
Like when the newborn is a baby star. See!
This is an image of the Hubble Space Telescope representing a part of a large nebula (cloud of gas and dust) called NGC 1333. The distance measurements vary, but it is probably more than 1000 light-years away, and are creating stars. Some of its stars are less than two million years old, which qualifies them as newborns.
In fact, there is a lot to see in this picture. Images are taken in the near infrared, the kind of light that can cross interstellar dust better than visible light. So we see inside the nebula. The dust makes the starlight behind it redder, so the stars on the right lie deep inside or on the other side of NGC 1333.
The bright star at the bottom left is BD +30 547, a young star associated with the nebula that, if you saw it well, would look pretty red. However, in the infrared filters used here, it appears whitish. You can see a bluish cloudiness (remember, really still infrared) around her; it is gas and dust that reflects the light of the star, we call it a reflection nebula.
But the diamond-shaped structure above it is more interesting. That's, I believe, a cavity dug into the nebula by several young stars inside. They blow violent winds of subatomic particles and repel the surrounding materials, such as a plow-clearing snow plow.
But look inside this cavity and you will see several bluish structures. These are called Herbig-Haro's objects, and are the special young stars. They are very young stars, still surrounded by a disc of gas and dust from which they were formed. The stars themselves are probably also spinning fast, and they have powerful magnetic fields that disappear like tornadoes from their poles. The materials captured in these fields are ejected from the star, forming highly focused jets of matter (astronomers would say collimated) whistling star poles at ridiculously high speeds, typically hundreds of kilometers per second.
Bipolar output!
There are five in this region, called HH7 – 11. I was a bit confused about the numbering, but fortunately I found an annotated map of the area in an article published in 2000 (see Figure 1 in this article) which guides the path: HH 7 is the blue spot on the upper left, HH8 is on the upper left of the cavity, HH9 on the upper right, HH10 is along the cavity and HH11 is the one on the right inside the cavity at the bottom right. All these marks mark the locations of newborn stars, blowing gas. Just like newborn humans.
It's interesting to see more of this nebula. Here is an image taken by my friend Travis Rector with the help of a 4-meter telescope in Kitt Peak, Arizona:
Oh wow! This is rotated about 90 ° counterclockwise in relation to the Hubble image. The bright star just down right from the center is BD +30,547, and the row of dark red drops just top left represents Hubble's image cavity. They look red here because of all the dust; they appear in blue in the Hubble image because it is an infrared image translated into visible light.
As you can see, the lower part of the nebula is deep red where it is not black. in some places, the dust is so thick that it totally blocks the light of the stars behind it. The upper part is blue and is another reflection nebula.
This highly prized object of astronomers has also been observed with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which looks much further in the infrared than Hubble can, far enough where the hot dust itself glows. NGC 1333 looks like a beast totally different from Spitzer:
Wow! This has about the same orientation as the image in visible light, but the photo is slightly tighter. There are still more Herbig-Haro items here; the right one in the center has curved jets! This may be due to precession; the star oscillates very slowly as it turns, like a peak that begins to decrease. Over time, the direction of the jet changes, in the manner of a sprinkler projecting water, giving it a curved appearance.
Do you want to see that look really different, though? So how about this:
Yes, it's still NGC 1333, but now you see the X-rays that come from it, detected using the Chandra X-ray observatory. The points are all sources of X-rays: the young stars of the nebula! We do not really know what causes them to emit X-rays, which takes a lot of energy, but this is probably due to the fact that their strong magnetic fields interact with the gas in the discs that surround them. Particles swept by magnetic fields can gain large amounts of energy, which they then irradiate as X-rays.
[Note:Sivousvoulezencoreuneautrevue[Note:Ifyouwantyetanotherview[Note:Sivousvoulezencoreuneautrevue[Note:Ifyouwantyetanotherviewtake a look at this incredible composite Robert Gendler used various telescopes.]
I've said it before (millions of times): What you see in astronomy depends on how you see it. And look what happens when you change your eyes! You can see deeper into the nebula, capture the forces that form the stars and blow large bubbles in the gas, or observe the interactions between stars and gas via magnetism on a scale extending over billions or even trillions of kilometers.
Even the familiar becomes unknown when we see it differently, but that's the goal, is not it? When you do, you learn something new and you enjoy it in a different way. In the universe as it is in life, it pays to enjoy different things in different ways. When you do, you get a much richer view of everything around you.
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