Hubble Captures Spectacular New Image of Multiple-Star System with its Winds and Jets

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a striking new image of the multiple star system, XZ Tauri, its neighbor and nearby stellar objects. The new picture reveals XZ Tauri blowing a hot bubble of gas into the surrounding space.

To the left of the center of the image, you can see XZ Tauri, embedded within a rust-colored cloud. While it looks as if it's a single star in the picture, it's actually composed of several stars-three in all. Above and to the right of XZ Tauri, you can see wisps of deep red that appear to be streaking away from blue-tinged clumps on the right. This bright blue patch contains a star known as HL Tauri.

This isn't all that the image shows, though. On the bottom right of the Hubble image, you can see a Herbig-Haro object. Herbig-Haro objects are streaks of hot gas blasted into space by newborn and newly forming stars. In this case, the object is associated with the variable star, V1213 Tauri, and is called HH 30 (opo9905). The star itself is hidden within a disk of dust that's split in half by a dark lane.

Both XZ Tauri and HL Tauri and textbook examples of a class of stars known as T Tauris, which are young and rapidly rotating stars with strong magnetic fields and powerful winds. These stars have yet to reach the temperatures necessary for hydrogen fusion deep in their cores, and it will probably take about 100 million years for the stars to trigger these reactions.

This isn't the first time that Hubble has imaged these objects, though. Previously, it viewed HH 30 alongside XZ Tauri with its Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. Now, though, the new image is shedding new light on this region of space.