Astronomers are using movies created from Hubble Space Telescope imagery to track the gassy burps belched out by young stars.

They say the moving pictures have already unraveled some of the mysteries surrounding Herbig-Haro objects, which are stars that send out colorful, blobby jets of glowing gas at supersonic speeds. The phenomenon is named after astronomers George Herbig and Guillermo Haro, who studied the outflows in the 1950s. Researchers still don't fully understand how the stars unleash such jets, but the new imagery has given them a better sense of the mechanism behind them.

The time-lapse movies were assembled from high-resolution still images collected by Hubble over the course of 14 years.

"For the first time, we can actually observe how these jets interact with their surroundings by watching these time-lapse movies," Rice University's Patrick Hartigan said today in a news release . "Those interactions tell us how young stars influence the environments out of which they form. With movies like these, we can now compare observations of jets with those produced by computer simulations and laboratory experiments to see which aspects of the interactions we understand and which we don't understand."

Source: msnbc.com