The Astrosphere of HD 61005

Do young stars blow bubbles? The larger view shows a stellar field observed with the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, and the inset highlights HD 61005 , a star like our Sun , only 120 light-years away. Much younger than the Sun, at just about 100 million years old, it blows a fast and dense stellar wind that pushes out the cooler dust and gas that surrounds it, forming a bubble called an astrosphere . The star-blown bubble was detected with the Chandra X-ray Observatory , and it has a diameter roughly 200 times the Earth-Sun distance . Our Sun has a bubble too, called the heliosphere , which protects the planets from cosmic radiation . Also shown in the inset is debris left behind from star formation, observed by Hubble . The debris appears as wings , giving the star its nickname: the Moth .