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EMBARGOED UNTIL: 1:00 a.m. (EST) March 16, 2000

PHOTO NO.: STScI-PRC00-05


HUBBLE FINDS YOUNG STARS IN COSMIC DANCE

This composite image, made with two cameras aboard NASA's Hubble Space
Telescope, shows a pair of 12 light-year-long jets of gas blasted into
space from a young system of three stars. The jet is seen in visible
light, and its dusty disk and stars are seen in infrared light. These
stars are located near a huge torus, or donut, of gas and dust from
which they formed. This torus is tilted edge-on and can be seen as a
dark bar near the bottom of the picture.

Apparently, a gravitational brawl among the stars occurred a few
thousand years ago and kicked out one member (on the left edge of the
bright blob above the disk). As a result, the two other stars were
joined together as a tight binary pair and flew off in the opposite direction,
and appear as a red blob below the disk.

The huge jet comes from one of the stars in this tight binary pair. The
star spews out streams of gas in opposite directions, like water from a
garden hose. It is not a smooth flow, but rather happens episodically,
creating lumps of gas that fly across space at over one million miles
per hour. These gaseous cannonballs catch up with and "rear-end" slower
moving blobs, creating a pattern that resembles a string of Christmas
lights embedded in the jet.

The visible-light image was taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary
Camera 2 in Nov. 1998 and the infrared image by Hubble's Near Infrared
Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer in Mar. 1998. The disk and
associated stars are embedded in a large dark cloud and are only visible
at infrared wavelengths.

Credit: NASA and B. Reipurth (CASA, Univ. of Colorado)

The research team consists of Bo Reipurth, Ka Chun Yu and John Bally
from the University of Colorado; Steve Heathcote from Cerro Tololo
Inter-American Observatory, and Luis Felipe Rodriguez from the
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM).