A Cosmic Skyrocket!

There are all sorts of odd objects in the Universe. This one, called "Herbig-Haro 110" is a geyser of hot gas from a newborn star that splashes up against and ricochets off the dense core of a cloud of molecular hydrogen:

Although the plumes of gas look like whiffs of smoke, they are actually billions of times less dense than the smoke from a July 4 firework. This Hubble Space Telescope photo shows the integrated light from plumes, which are light-years across.

Herbig-Haro (HH) objects come in a wide array of shapes, but the basic configuration stays the same. Twin jets of heated gas, ejected in opposite directions away from a forming star, stream through interstellar space. Astronomers suspect that these outflows are fueled by gas accreting onto a young star surrounded by a disk of dust and gas. The disk is the "fuel tank," the star is the gravitational engine, and the jets are the exhaust.

Read the whole article here: Hubble site

This really makes me wonder what our sun would look like if we were looking at it from another Galaxy or father off. I wonder how our sun would reflect off of the planets and the pockets of gas around it and perhaps even a very visible display of dust, planets, comets and everything inside of it. That would be totaly remarkable.

Time to build bigger and better telescopes!