Orion nebula in most detail yet
14 January 2006
by Richard
Conan-Davies
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One of the most detailed images of the Orion Nebula had been produced by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Regarded as one of astronomy's most dramatic and photogenic celestial objects it is a region of turbulent star formation. Jennifer Wiseman, NASA's Hubble program scientist explained that "Orion is a bustling cauldron of activity. This new large-scale Hubble image of the region reveals a treasure-house of beauty and astonishing detail for comprehensive scientific study," The images includes details from jets fired by stars still embedded in their dust and gas cocoons to disks of material encircling young stars that could be the building blocks of future solar systems. The mosaic image contains some billion pixels and uncovered thousands of stars never seen before in visible light. Some are just one-hundredth the brightness of previously seen stars. Massimo Robberto, observation leader, of the Space Telescope Science Institute also said that "The wealth of information in this Hubble survey, including seeing stars of all sizes in one dense place, provides an extraordinary opportunity to study star formation," "Our goal is to calculate the masses and ages for these young stars, so that we can map their history and get a general scenario of the star formation in that region. We can then sort the stars by mass and age and look for trends." Because Orion is 1,500 light-years away, a galatically actually a short distance, it is a perfect laboratory to study how stars are born. The situation in the Nebula is a that massive stars in the center of the nebula have blown out most of the dust and gas in which they formed, carving out a hole in the dark cloud of gas and dust. This allows Astronomers have a clear view into this crowded stellar maternity ward. This detailed study took 105 Hubble orbits to complete. All imaging instruments aboard the telescope were used at the same time to study Orion. |
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Related Links
Original press release from HubbleSite
Nature
& Science News
ClearlyExplained.com