A bright young star is surrounded by a shroud of thick gas and dust in this stunning image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) inspected a young stellar object, over 9,000 light-years away in the constellation Taurus, to help astronomers understand the earli
IRAS 05506+2414 imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. SahaiNASA. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 inspected a young stellar object, over 9,000 light-years away in the constellation Taurus, to help astronomers understand the earliest stages in the lives of massive stars. This object — which is known to astronomers as IRAS 05506+2414 — is thought to be an example of an explosive event caused by the disruption of a massive young star system.
Usually, the swirling discs of material surrounding a young star are funneled into twin outflows of gas and dust from the star. In the case of IRAS 05506+2414, however, a fan-like spray of material traveling at velocities of up to 350 kilometers per second is spreading outwards from the center of this image.
Astronomers turned to Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to measure the distance to IRAS 05506+2414. While it is possible to measure the velocity of material speeding outwards from the star, astronomers cannot tell how far from Earth the star actually is from a single observation. However, by measuring the distance that the outflow travels between successive images, they will be able to infer the distance to IRAS 05506+2414.
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