|Detail of the Orion Nebula|
HUBBLE PROBES THE GREAT ORION NEBULA
A NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of a region of the Great
Nebula in Orion.
This is one of the nearest regions of very recent star formation
(300,000 years ago). The nebula is a giant gas cloud illuminated
by the brightest of the young hot stars at the top of the
picture. Many of the fainter young stars are surrounded by disks
of dust and gas that are slightly more than twice the diameter of
the Solar System.
The great plume of gas in the lower left in this picture is the
result of the ejection of material from a recently formed star.
The brightest portions are "hills" on the surface of the nebula, and the long bright bar is where Earth observers look along a long "wall" on a gaseous surface. The diagonal length of the image is 1.6 light-years. Red light depicts emission in Nitrogen; green is Hydrogen; and blue is Oxygen.
The Orion Nebula star-birth region is 1,500 light-years away, in the direction of the constellation Orion the Hunter. The image was taken on 29 December 1993 with the HST's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. credit: C.R. O'Dell/Rice University NASA
|Students for the Exploration and Development of Space|
Created by R. Mark Elowitz
Maintained byGuy K. McArthur