Herbig-Haro 46/47 (NIRCam Image)
These stars have a lot of energy to let loose!
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured a tightly bound pair of actively forming stars, known as Herbig-Haro 46/47, in high-resolution near-infrared light. Look for them at the center of the red diffraction spikes. The stars are buried deeply, appearing as an orange-white splotch. They are surrounded by a disk of gas and dust that continues to add to their mass.
Herbig-Haro 46/47 is an important object to study because it is relatively young – only a few thousand years old. Stars take millions of years to fully form. Targets like this also give researchers insight into how stars gather mass over time, potentially allowing them to model how our own Sun, a low-mass star, formed.
The two-sided orange lobes were created by earlier ejections from these stars. The stars’ more recent ejections appear in a thread-like blue, running along the angled diffraction spike that covers the orange lobes.