Starship Asterisk*

Ailean4321 wrote:The caption says its in "false-color." What exactly does that mean?

Guest wrote:On the left moving right, I see a gorilla's face in profile with his mouth open (as though singing), a lamprey, a turtle's head, and a natural sponge. On the right, I see many things, including Puss-n-Boots's head (with hat!), a hooded cobra with an eagle's head, and an ostrich head.

• On the very left edge, there appears to be a half a cat (No Relations with Eric the Half a Bee).
• The face of a quaker looking up and toward the brightest star in the picture.
• Right under his chin, facing the opposite direction, seems to be a dog of one form or another.
• Next is some sort of marmot or badger or something like that. Next is a tie between a bird that's just about to fly of, a sheep or perhaps a marmot, and a mountain gorilla.
• after a few inches of nothing, we find, standing out in the doorway, a face in a cocoon, followed by a raven
• There's a pillar of star creation just about dead center that looks far too ... *ahem* we'll leave it up to the imagination.
• Some sort of otter is just right of center. Looks like he's winking. directly under him appears to be a faxe looking just slightly to the viewer's left (his right)
• and, most importantly, I see lots and lots of hydrogen that looks lie a VERY fertile ground for star formation.

bcasa wrote:
it would be interesting if in the information some discussion was made as to approximately when this occured, since it is so many light years away, and how different it might look if you could see what it looks like now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbig-Haro_object wrote:

Images taken over five years reveal the motion of material in HH47.

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<<Herbig–Haro objects (HH) are small patches of nebulosity associated with newly born stars, and are formed when gas ejected by young stars collides with clouds of gas and dust nearby at speeds of several hundred kilometres per second. Herbig–Haro objects are ubiquitous in star-forming regions, and several are often seen around a single star, aligned along its rotational axis.

HH objects are transient phenomena, lasting not more than a few thousand years. They can evolve visibly over quite short timescales as they move rapidly away from their parent star into the gas clouds in interstellar space (the interstellar medium or ISM). Hubble Space Telescope observations reveal complex evolution of HH objects over a few years, as parts of them fade while others brighten as they collide with clumpy material in the interstellar medium.

Spectroscopic observations of HH objects show they are moving away from the source stars at speeds of 100 to 1000 km/s. In recent years, the high optical resolution of Hubble Space Telescope observations has revealed the proper motion of many HH objects in observations spaced several years apart. These observations have also allowed estimates of the distances of some HH objects via the expansion parallax method.

As they move away from the parent star, HH objects evolve significantly, varying in brightness on timescales of a few years. Individual knots within an object may brighten and fade or disappear entirely, while new knots have been seen to appear. As well as changes caused by interactions with the ISM, interactions between jets moving at different speeds within HH objects also cause variations.

The eruption of jets from the parent stars occurs in pulses rather than as a steady stream. The pulses may produce jets of gas moving in the same direction but at different speeds, and interactions between different jets create so-called "working surfaces", where streams of gases collide and generate shock waves.>>