Astronomers create movies of star births

PARIS, Aug. 31 (UPI) -- New stars emit jets of glowing gas at supersonic speed through space, a process that's now been captured in a "movie" created by U.S. and European astronomers.

Astronomers have looked at still pictures of stellar jets for decades, but now they can watch movies of the phenomena thanks to the Hubble telescope and NASA and European Space Agency scientists.

A team led by astronomer Patrick Hartigan of Rice University has collected enough high-resolution Hubble images over a 14-year period to stitch together time-lapse movies of jets ejected from three young stars, a release from ESA headquarters in Paris said Wednesday.

The moving pictures offer a new take on stellar processes that change and evolve over just a few years, compared with most astronomical processes that change over timescales longer than a human lifetime.

"For the first time we can actually observe how these jets interact with their surroundings by watching these time-lapse movies," Hartigan said. "Those interactions tell us how young stars influence the environments out of which they form.

"With movies like these, we can now compare observations of jets with those produced by computer simulations and laboratory experiments to see which aspects of the interactions we understand and which we don't understand."