The Orion Nebula is one of the most photographed deep-sky objects out there, partly because it looks so cool.
Amateurs can take advantage of its proximity -- just 1,500 light-years away -- to make striking images from their backyards. Professional astronomers study it because it's the closest intense star-formation region around, yielding insights into ancient times when star birth was all the rage. Theorists say our solar system might have been born in a chaotic place like Orion before drifting out to its current, rather lonely surroundings.
This new image was taken with a European Southern Observatory telescope in Chile. It was released last week.
Also called M42, Orion is a cloud of gas and dust that serves as a womb for stellar birth. It is a neighbor in terms of the overall Milky Way, which is more than 100,000 light-years wide.
Astronomers say tens of thousands of stars have been born in the nebula within the past 10 million years or so. For comparison, the Sun is 4.6 billion years old and considered middle-aged.
As with any space image, the colors and patterns in this picture are influenced by the filters used. Astronomers generally gather multiple images with specific filters, to highlight certain emissions from certain chemicals, then they colorize and combine the images into a single view (see Coloring the Universe: Why Reality is a Gray Area in Astronomy).
Here are two strikingly different photos of Orion:
-- Robert
Roy Britt
Credit: ESO; Massimo Robberto, Space Telescope
Science Institute
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