This composite image, made with two cameras aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows a pair of 12 light-year-long jets of gas blasted into space from a young system of three stars. The jet is seen in visible light, and its dusty disk and stars are seen in infrared light. These stars are located near a huge torus, or donut, of gas and dust from which they formed. This torus is tilted edge-on and can be seen as a dark bar near the bottom of the picture.
<p>Apparently, a gravitational brawl among the stars occurred a few thousand years ago and kicked out one member (on the left edge of the bright blob above the disk). As a result, the two other stars were joined together as a tight binary pair and flew off in the opposite direction, and appear as a red blob below the disk.
</p><p>The huge jet comes from one of the stars in this tight binary pair. The star spews out streams of gas in opposite directions, like water from a garden hose. It is not a smooth flow, but rather happens episodically, creating lumps of gas that fly across space at over one million miles per hour. These gaseous cannonballs catch up with and "rear-end" slower moving blobs, creating a pattern that resembles a string of Christmas lights embedded in the jet.
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The visible-light image was taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in Nov. 1998 and the infrared image by Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer in Mar. 1998. The disk and associated stars are embedded in a large dark cloud and are only visible at infrared wavelengths.
NASA and B. Reipurth (CASA, Univ. of Colorado)
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