Hubble captured the dawn of a Sun-like star! 🌅
Cosmos Astronomia®This new image shows a triple-star system located about 550 light-years away.
These three stars blaze from the hollowed-out cavity of a reflection nebula, illuminating the surrounding clouds. They're known as HP Tau, HP Tau G2, and HP Tau G3.
HP Tau (in the cloud and the top of the central trio) is classified as a T Tauri star, which is a young variable star that hasn't begun nuclear fusion yet, but is starting to evolve into a hydrogen-fueled star similar to our Sun.
T Tauri stars are typically younger than 10 million years old and are often found still swaddled in the clouds of gas and dust from which they formed. (For context, our Sun is 4.6 billion years old!)
A variable star's brightness changes over time. More specifically, T Tauri stars have both periodic and random fluctuations in brightness. The random changes could be caused by things like flares on the star's surface, whereas periodic changes might be due to giant sunspots rotating in and out of view.
This new Hubble image was taken with Wide Field Camera 3, which was installed onto the telescope 15 years ago this week, during the final astronaut servicing mission to the orbiting observatory.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
