Washington: The ESA/NASA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has captured a striking image of what looks like a cosmic, double-bladed lightsaber.
Incidentally, Hubble's latest treat came just in time for the release of “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens”.
In the center of the image, partially obscured by a dark, Jedi-like cloak of dust, a newborn star shoots twin jets out into space as a sort of birth announcement to the universe.
Bearing a striking resemblance to Darth Maul’s double-bladed lightsabre in Star Wars Episode One, the spectacular twin jets of material slicing across this incredible image are spewing out from a newly formed star that is obscured from view, cloaked by swirling dust and gas, wrote ESA in a statement.
This celestial lightsaber does not lie in a galaxy far, far away, but rather inside our home galaxy, the Milky Way. It’s inside a turbulent birthing ground for new stars known as the Orion B molecular cloud complex, located 1,350 light-years away.
As the jets collide with the surrounding gas and dust and clear vast spaces, they create curved shock waves, which are the hallmarks of Herbig-Haro (HH) objects - tangled, knotted clumps of nebulosity, it added.
(Source: ESA/NASA)
