Credit: Credit: J. Hester (Arizona State University), the WFPC 2 Investigation Definition Team, and NASA

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.

Provider: Hubble Space Telescope | ESA

Image Source: https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo9524f/

Curator: ESA/Hubble, Garching bei München, Germany

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License