Herbig-Haro objects like HH 7–11 are transient phenomena. Traveling away from the star that created them at a speed of up to 250,000 kilometers (150,000 miles) per hour, they vanish into oblivion within a few tens of thousands of years. SVS 13 is the young star that is the source of HH 7-11, and all five objects are moving away from SVS 13 toward the upper left. The current distance between HH 7 and SVS 13 is about 20,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. Herbig–Haro objects are formed when jets of ionized gas ejected by a young star collide with nearby clouds of gas and dust at high speeds. The Herbig-Haro objects in this image were formed when the jets from the newborn star SVS 13 collided with the surrounding clouds and created the five brilliant clumps of light within the reflection nebula.
