The reddish jet emanates from the inner region of the disk, and possibly directly from the star itself. Hubble's detailed view shows, for the first time, that the jet expands for several billion miles from the star, but then stays confined to a narrow beam. The protostar is 450 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. The protostar is 1,500 light- years away and in the vicinity of the Orion Nebula, a nearby star birth region. Hubble's detailed view shows that the jet has burrowed a cavity through the dense gas cloud and now travels at high speed into interstellar space.
Shock waves form when the jet collides with interstellar gas, causing the jet to glow.
The white filaments on the left reflect light from the obscured newborn star. The scale in the bottom left corner of each picture represents 93 billion miles, or 1,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. All images were taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in visible light. This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals unprecedented detail in a newly forming star called HH-30. The jets emanate from the center of a dark disk of dust which encircles the star and hides it from view.