Hubble probes the great Orion Nebula | 29/12/1993 | ||
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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. | ||
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Image Credit: C.R. O'Dell/Rice University, NASA. | |||
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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. |
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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. |
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