HH 30

Herbig-Haro 30 (HH 30) is a young stellar object located approximately 450 light-years from Earth in the dark cloud complex of the Taurus constellation. It is a newly forming star system still embedded in the molecular cloud from which it was born, making it a valuable object for studying the earliest stages of stellar evolution.

HH 30 is distinguished by its protoplanetary disk being oriented almost perfectly edge-on as seen from Earth, so the disk obscures the central star and appears as a dark lane bisecting the object. This rare geometry has made HH 30 one of the most studied and photographed examples of disk structure in star formation research.

HH 30 exhibits bipolar jets—narrow streams of gas ejected at high velocity from both poles of the young star perpendicular to the plane of the protoplanetary disk. These jets collide with surrounding material and create the glowing structures characteristic of Herbig-Haro objects, providing insight into how young stars shed angular momentum during formation.

HH 30 has been extensively imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, which produced some of the most detailed and celebrated observations of an edge-on protoplanetary disk. These Hubble images revealed the disk's structure, the dark dust lane, and the dynamics of the bipolar jet outflows in unprecedented detail.