Peering into the Orion Nebula

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Orion Nebula:
Peering into the Orion Nebula


Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State/E.Feigelson & K.Getman et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/M. Robberto et al.

At a distance of about 1,500 light years, the Orion Nebula is one of the closest star formation regions to Earth. This makes Orion - a favorite for amateur astronomers and casual sky watchers - an excellent location to study how stars are born and behave during their stellar childhoods. In this composite image, the central region of Orion is seen as never before through NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope.

The bright point-like sources (blue and orange) in this image are the burgeoning stars captured in X-ray light by a long series of Chandra observations. These nearly continuous observations, lasting almost 13 days, allowed astronomers to monitor the activity of Sun-like stars between 1 and 10 million years old. The fledgling stars were seen to flare in their X-ray intensity much more than our Sun does today. This suggests our Sun had many violent and energetic outbursts when it was much younger. The wispy filaments (pink and purple) are clouds of gas and dust as seen by Hubble in optical light. This gas and dust will one day condense into disks of material from which future generations of stars will be born.

Source: Chandra - Photo Album Edited October 4, 2007 by Waspie_Dwarf

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More Images of Orion Nebula

Chandra X-ray Image of Orion Nebula

This Chandra image shows the Orion Nebula Cluster, a rich cluster of young stars observed almost continuously for 13 days. The long observation enabled scientists to study the X-ray behavior of young Sun-like stars with ages between 1 and 10 million years. They discovered that these young stars produce violent X-ray outbursts, or flares, that are much more frequent and energetic than anything seen today from our 4.6 billion-year-old Sun. More information.
Scale: Image is 5.7 arcmin across.
(Credit:NASA/CXC/Penn State/E.Feigelson & K.Getman et al.)

Hubble Optical Image of Orion Nebula

Packed into the center of this region are bright lights of the Trapezium stars, the four heftiest stars in the Orion Nebula. Ultraviolet light unleashed by these stars is carving a cavity in the nebula and disrupting the growth of hundreds of smaller stars. The dark speck near the bottom, right of the image is a silhouette of an edge-on disk encircling a young star. Another whitish-looking disk is visible near the bottom, left, just above the two bright stars. This disk is encased in a bubble of gas and dust. More information at Hubble.
Scale: Image is 5.7 arcmin across.
(Credit: NASA/ESA/STScI/AURA/The Hubble Heritage Team)

Source: Chandra - Photo Album