Failed stars, baby stars and vast cosmic canyons of dust and gas were visible in a new Hubble Space Telescope image of the Orion Nebula released today.
The image, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope, is the sharpest view ever taken of this region.
"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," said Jennifer Wiseman, Nasa's Hubble programme scientist.
The crisp image is a tapestry of star formation. It varies 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, Nasa said.
In a mosaic containing a billion pixels, Hubble's ACS uncovered thousands of stars never seen before in visible light. Some are merely one-hundredth the brightness of previously viewed Orion stars.
Observation leader Massimo Robberto of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, said: "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."
Orion is 1,500 light-years away, a relatively short distance within our 100,000 light-year wide galaxy.
Astronomers have a clear view into this crowded stellar maternity ward, because massive stars in the centre of the nebula have blown out most of the dust and gas in which they formed, carving out a cavity in the dark cloud of gas and dust.
This extensive study took 105 Hubble orbits to complete.
- HERALD ONLINE STAFF
Eye on the sky
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