July 28, 2023

The Herbig-Haro 46/47 object

An image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope portrays Herbig-Haro 46/47, or simply HH 46/47, a nebula of ionized gas that emits a faint light in which two lobes are very bright instead. The two numbers are due to the fact that there are two young stars still growing in the middle of a disk of gas and dust. Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument captured details of that area never seen before. The nebula is invisible at optical frequencies and is blue at infrared. The most spectacular part is the one characteristic of the Herbig-Haro objects with the ionized stellar winds forming two lobes visible in the image in orange hues.