This spectacular color panorama of the center the Orion nebula is one of the largest pictures ever assembled from individual images taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The picture, seamlessly composited from a mosaic of 15 separate fields, covers an area of sky about five percent the area covered by the full Moon.
The seemingly infinite tapestry of rich detail revealed by Hubble shows a churning turbulent star factory set within a maelstrom of flowing, luminescent gas. Though this 2.5 light-years wide view is still a small portion of the entire nebula, it includes almost all of the light from the bright glowing clouds of gas and a star cluster associated with the nebula. Hubble reveals details as small as 4.1 billion miles across.
Like the Grand Canyon, the Orion nebula has a dramatic surface topography -- of glowing gasses instead of rock -- with peaks, valleys and walls. They are illuminated and heated by a torrent of energetic ultraviolet light from its four hottest and most massive stars, called the Trapezium, which lie near the center of the image. In addition to the Trapezium, this stellar cavern contains 700 hundred other young stars at various stages of formation.
The mosaic also reveals at least 153 glowing protoplanetary disks (first discovered with the Hubble in 1992, and dubbed "proplyds") that are believed to be embryonic solar systems that will eventually form planets. The abundance of such objects in the Orion nebula strengthens the argument that planet formation is a common occurrence in the universe.
Camera: WFPC2
Technical information: To create this color mosaic, 45 separate images of the Orion nebula were taken in blue, green and red between January 1994 and March 1995. Light emitted by oxygen is shown as blue, hydrogen emission is shown as green, and nitrogen emission as red light. The overall color balance is close to that which an observer living near the Orion nebula would see. The irregular borders produced by the HST images have been smoothed out by the addition of images from the European Southern Observatory in Chile obtained by Bo Reipurth and John Bally, these being about 2% of the area shown here and lying at the top left corner. This image has been artistically enhanced.
