Jokes aside, Orion is one of the best known and most studied constellations in the world Galaxy. With its nearest stars being only a few hundred light years away Earththe constellation is home to some of the largest and brightest stars in the sky (including the infamous red star Betelgeuse) and a thriving nursery of fiery, newborn stars ripe for study. Now, using the powerful new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers captured the sharpest and most detailed images of Orion in history. The images, which were shared on Monday (September 12) on a statement, They do not include Orion’s infamous three-star “belt,” but focus on Orion’s gaseous “sword” hanging just to the south. At the center of the sword is the Orion Nebula – one of the largest and brightest star-forming regions near Earth.
A detailed image of the Orion Nebula, showing the region’s fragrant filaments of hydrogen gas, disks of dust forming planets and globules of gas collapsing into baby stars. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, PDRs4All ERS Team, image editing by Salomé Fuenmayor) Visible to the naked eye from our planet, the Orion Nebula has for centuries been a popular target for astrologers – including the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who is credited with discovering the nebula’s largest star cluster, called the Trapezium, more than 400 years ago years. Now, new JWST images zoom into the heart of the nebula like never before, revealing changing sculptures of star-forming gas formed by powerful stellar radiation. “Big young stars emit large amounts of ultraviolet radiation directly into the surrounding cloud, and this changes the physical shape of the cloud as well as its chemical composition,” said Els Peeters, professor of astronomy at Western University in Ontario, Canada. he said in a statement. “These new observations allow us to better understand how massive stars transform the cloud of gas and dust in which they are born.” In the center of the image shines the bright star omicron 2 Orionis A, located about 186 light-years from Earth. The nebula itself lies far behind, about 1,350 light-years from Earth, where thousands of young stars illuminate and radiate the gas clouds around them. The violent interactions between the stars and their host cloud can be seen most clearly in the long, brown streak of gas that lies behind the central star. This dense wall of gas is known as Orion’s bar, and it is slowly being pushed outward and eroded by intense stellar radiation from the hottest, brightest stars in the Orion Nebula. Sprinkled throughout the bar are a number of spectacular and mysterious features, including long, smelly hydrogen filaments, young stars surrounded by planet-forming disks of dust, and large balls of gas slowly collapsing into baby stars before astronomers’ eyes. Galileo would be impressed. Originally published in Live Science.
