Spitzer's Orion

[FLO]

Few cosmic vistas excite the imagination like the Orion Nebula, an immense stellar nursery some 1,500 light-years away. Also known as M42, the nebula is visible to the unaided eye, but this stunning infrared view from the Spitzer Space Telescope penetrates the turbulent cosmic gas and dust clouds to explore the region in unprecedented detail. At full resolution, the remarkable image data yields a census of new stars and potential solar systems. About 2,300 young stars surrounded by planet-forming disks were detected based on the infrared glow of their warm dust, along with about 200 stellar embryos, stars too young to have developed disks. This 0.8 by 1.4 degree false-colour image is about 20 light-years wide at the distance of the Orion Nebula.

Credit: Thomas Megeath (Univ. Toledo) et al., JPL, Caltech, NASA

http://tinyurl.com/ruj7w

[The Warthog]

Fascinating picture. I would have thought the disk and the star formed together, though... :?

[Astroman]

Fascinating picture. I would have thought the disk and the star formed together, though... :?

Interesting you should say that, WH. I just attended a talk on the NASA "Orion" satellite to be launched in 2007. The presenter was saying that in stellar evolution, the star forms from a dark, cool cloud of molecular hydrogen and dust. When the star ignites, it tends to blow huge amounts of material off its own surface. This occurs almost exclusively at the rotational poles of the star which clears the polar areas around the satr of material. The remaining material forms a disk in line with the equator of the star. The space craft is designed to detect directly these IR bright disks, along with UV studies of the star and system as a whole.

[Mike Godfrey]

A beautiful image !

Cheers for sharing it.

Mike

[OXO]

Lovely image 8)