Jan 11 2006
From The Space Library
NASA announced that the HST had captured an unprecedented look at the Orion Nebula, the region of massive star formation nearest Earth, at 1,500 light-years away. At the center of the Nebula is a group of four young, massive stars, known as the Trapezium, which radiate a stream of energetic x rays called a stellar wind. Stellar winds have blown out much of the dust and gas in which the stars form, thereby carving out a cavity that permits astronomers to view the Nebula. In a mosaic containing a billion pixels, Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) had uncovered thousands of stars never seen before in visible light, including some that were only 100th the brightness of previously viewed Orion stars. Among the stars studied were young brown dwarfs and a small population of possible binary brown dwarfs (two brown dwarfs orbiting each other). According to observation leader Massimo Robberto, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, the information garnered from the Hubble survey, along with the ability to observe stars of all sizes in one dense area of space, would enable astronomers to calculate the masses and ages of the young stars in the Orion Nebula and to “get a general scenario of star formation in that region.”
NASA, “NASA’s Hubble Reveals Thousands of Orion Nebula Stars,” news release 06-007, 11 January 2006, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/jan/HQ_06007_HST_AAS.html (accessed 14 September 2009); Ker Than, “The Splendor of Orion: A Star Factory Unveiled,” Space.com, 11 January 2006, http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060111_orion_news.html (accessed 28 June 2010).
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
