NASA captures ‘rare celestial phenomenon’ that resembles huge crack in the heavens

Space supposedly goes on forever, but NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope recently photographed something resembling a horizon where none should exist.

The image, shared on Facebook, shows a fluorescent blue line that stretched for billions of miles — like a big crack in all that vast nothingness.

What was it?

NASA and the European Space Agency say they have seen this kind of thing before and it’s neither a horizon, a crack or a “white hole,” as some have suggested.

It’s a Herbig-Haro object.

“This NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope image features a relatively rare celestial phenomenon, occurring when newly formed stars expel very narrow jets of rapidly moving ionized gas,” the European Space Agency explained in a release.

“These spectacular objects develop under very specific circumstances. Newly formed stars are often very active, and in some cases they expel very narrow jets of rapidly moving ionized gas — gas that is so hot that its molecules and atoms have lost their electrons, making the gas highly charged.”

The jets of gas travel at “speeds of hundreds of miles per second,” the agency reports.

However, a Herbig-Haro object appears only in cases where the jets collide “with the clouds of gas and dust surrounding newly formed stars,” experts say.

Herbig-Haro objects are rarely observed because the intense light created by the phenomenon is often absorbed by “surrounding dust and gas,” agency officials said.

The objects can reach “temperatures of around 10,000 Kelvin” (17,540 degrees Fahrenheit) and their explosive appearance may actually have evolved over a period of years, according to Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.

NASA Sept. 5 post of the image has gotten 11,000 reactions and more than 300 comments on Facebook. This includes some who wondered what would happen if a space craft crossed paths with gas jets traveling at hundreds of miles per second.

“I pity the planet in the path of those jets,” one user wrote.

“Please don’t fly into the ionized gas. It is hotter than the sun,” another commenter posted.

This story was originally published September 7, 2021 at 8:03 AM with the headline "NASA captures ‘rare celestial phenomenon’ that resembles huge crack in the heavens."