Extraordinary time-lapse movies taken by NASA's Hubble
Space Telescope show that spectacular outbursts from young
stars can change dramatically over a period of just weeks or
months.
Before Hubble's sharp view, most scientists viewed the
universe as timeless; things changed so slowly outside our own
solar system researchers rarely considered the
possibility of movies. Now with Hubble, pictures taken of the
universe today won't necessarily look the same as those
snapped a few months from now.
Documenting the startling activity in the early stages of a
star's life, Hubble viewed jets of gas plowing into space at
hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, and moving shadows
many billions of miles in size. Individual images taken over a
period of a few years were then combined into time-lapse
movies.
The young star systems featured in the movies, XZ Tauri and HH
30, reside about 450 light-years from Earth in the Taurus-
Auriga molecular cloud, one of the nearest stellar nurseries
to our planet. Both systems are probably less than one million
years old, making them relative newborns, since stars
typically live for billions of years.
Animation and image files are available on NASA Television,
available on the GE-2 satellite, transponder 9C, located at 85
degrees West longitude, vertical polarization, with a
frequency of 3880 MHz and audio at 6.8 MHz.
General Science Education Major
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