#protostar

Utter and beautiful chaos is the best way to describe what can be seen in the above image.

The Dragon Jet (protostellar outflow system HH288), was discovered in the 1990’s and is a protostar region located in a region of Cassiopeia- roughly 6500 light years from Earth. The name comes from its resemblance to a Chinese dragon, spanning about 9.8 light years.

The red, orange and yellow emissions are mostly due to emission lines of shock-heated molecular hydrogen. The gas in the main flow of the Dragon is moving at speeds of 100-200 kilometres per second. There are two other outflows that are associated with the dragon: one linear running from lower left to upper right, and another from lower right to upper right. A couple small, new flows might be present as well. It is thought that there might be at least 5 different protostars forming simultaneously in the system.

Towards the bottom edge of the image, there appears to be a small cluster of stars which also appear to be ejecting jets of molecular hydrogen gas.

The image consists of five individual mosaics spanning various wavelengths- blue colours are shorter wavelengths while red colours are longer.