The Hourglass (Herbig-Haro 46/47)

A portrait of volatile youth. Herbig-Haro 46/47 captures the violent tantrums of a pair of stars only a few thousand years old—infants in cosmic time. Buried deep within a disc of gas and dust (appearing as a black nebula), these stars are feeding on their surroundings. To regulate their spin, they eject material in two-sided jets that span light-years.

The result is a stunning, two-lobed structure. The orange lobes are earlier ejections, while the delicate blue threads tracing the diffraction spikes represent the most recent outflows. The entire system is enveloped in a semi-transparent blue nebula, outlined in soft orange. It is a dynamic visualization of the process of accretion—the very mechanism that formed our own sun.

Scientific provenance

Editions

• Fine Art — museum-grade pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag® Metallic. Numbered edition of 50 per size, with a Numbered Certificate of Authenticity.
• Poster — pigment print on archival photo paper. Open edition.
• Framed or unframed — either edition can be framed in a slim black frame with shatter-resistant acrylic glazing, ready to hang (50 × 50 and 50 × 70 cm). Framed works ship free within the EU; unframed prints ship rolled in a protective tube.

Printed to order in our Vilnius studio on an Epson SureColor P20500 with UltraChrome PRO12 pigment inks, and dispatched within 5–7 business days. Each size is composed for its own proportions: we crop, we never stretch, and we never add or generate image content.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. DePasquale (STScI). Licensed under CC BY 4.0; cropped and colour-managed for print. UniverseMuseum is an independent studio and is not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI or the Rubin Observatory.