Newly born stars continuously emit gas at high velocities, which violently collide with and glow from the gas and dust clouds surrounding the star. This shock wave is also called a Herbig-Haro object or HH object.
These are rare sights in the night sky, and the Hubble telescope recently captured two such objects, HH46 and HH47, in the southern constellation Vela, just 1,400 light-years from Earth.
Until 1997, most astronomers thought that HH objects were some kind of reflection nebula, a cloud of gas reflecting the light from a nearby star. Others speculated that the nebula was a shock wave produced by the gas ejected by a star striking surrounding material.
Finally, astronomers have identified the substance of this object by finding newborn stars inside the long, bar-shaped shock wave.
Astronomers estimate that this newly captured image of the shock wave shows the star inside ejecting gas at speeds of up to 150 kilometers per second into the surrounding material.
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