Supernovae may produce some of the most destructively spectacular scenes, but stars don’t just die violently, they’re also born that way. 

Protostars, or baby stars, grow in chaotically energetic environments, made all the more chaotic when these fledgling stars fire energetic jets from their poles at hundreds of kilometers per second. 

Accordingly, a recently released Hubble Space Telescope image captured the consequences of these jets, which smash into surrounding gas and dust to produce brilliantly glowing clouds in the protostar’s environment. 

Credit: NASA, ESA, and B. Reipurth (Planetary Science Institute); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

Setting Space Ablaze with Supercharged Jets

As per Hubble’s latest gift to humanity, above, these pink-green blazing regions are called Herbig-Haro (HH) objects. They occur when protostars stars feed from a huge infalling reservoir of gas, often in the form of a ring, or “accretion disk.” 

But when one feeds a baby, not all of the food goes in. Some of the ionized (electrically charged) material from the accretion disk is funneled along the protostar’s magnetic field and shot out from the star’s poles in the form of bipolar jets that blast into space, in this case, at over 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) per second — the fastest ever observed from a young stellar object. 

These jets smash into shrouds and shreds of gas that were previously ejected by the same star. The resultant shockwave heats the gas and excites its atoms, generating a vibrant glow. 

And though the Hubble image shows two HH objects, the upper-left smudge and the lower-right streak, they’re produced by a single protostar, IRAS 18162-2048, located around 5,500 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. This superlative star holds 20 times the mass of the Sun and is the most massive young stellar object in the star-birthing L291 molecular cloud. 

An Unprecedented Youngster

In addition to being aesthetically appealing, RAS 18162-2048 emits the biggest outflows of any protostar, spanning 32 light-years in extent. It also generates an extreme magnetic field about 100 times stronger than Earth’s.

Radio waves reaching Earth from a protostar with an accretion disk and bipolar jets. Credit: AG Cheriyan/IIST

In fact, this is a historic magnetic field: in July 2025, the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NSF NRAO) studied the protostar’s dynamism in groundbreaking detail. The research revealed that the magnetic mechanisms that launch a protostar’s jets are akin to those that launch similar bipolar jets from supermassive black holes — a great reminder that nature often reuses its designs.

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