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Orion Nebula
By Robin Lloyd
Science Editor
posted: 07:00 am ET
19 January 2001
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What was found
The heart of the Orion Nebula harbors about 1,000 very young stars about 1 million years old, all crowded within a relatively tiny space within the Trapezium Cluster, the new image shows.
In the past couple of years, several of the world's most powerful ground- and space-based telescopes have made detailed infrared studies of the Orion Nebula and the Trapezium Cluster, but the VLT image shown here is the "deepest" wide-field image obtained so far.
McCaughrean and his colleagues obtained the Trapezium Cluster image in December 1999 with the infrared multi-mode ISAAC instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s VLT at Paranal.
The image reveals powerful explosions and winds from the most massive stars in the region, as well as the contours of gas sculpted by these stars and more finely focused jets of gas flowing from the smaller stars.
In the next year, astronomers hope for even sharper images of the Orion Nebula and other objects when one of the four VLT telescopes is equipped with adaptive optics to eliminate the blurring effects of the Earth's atmosphere. Beyond that, crisper, more penetrating images will come when all four telescopes are combined to form the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). With these new facilities, astronomers will be able to make very detailed studies. Among others things, they will be looking for evidence of dust and gas in disks around young stars in Orion as they coalesce to form planets.
Astronomers hope to continue to use the VLT to answer the questions about the "very low mass objects" in the Orion Nebula. More infrared images of the nebula were taken in December 2000 by the VLT team. They will be combined with the earlier data shown here to create a very deep survey of the central area of the Orion Nebula.
"The IR sky is still a mystery to some extent," McCaughrean said. "There are now good near-IR sky surveys going on for the first time and we're seeing the galaxy in a completely different way. But if you take an image with the VLT, you get much deeper than a sky survey. You're seeing much more than you did before. You're seeing something that nobody's ever seen before."
Click here for more news and information about deep space.
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