The James Webb Space Telescope has captured two stunning wide-field mosaic images of the massive Orion Nebula, a large star-forming region that is one of the solar system’s closest stellar nurseries. It is located only 1344 light years away.
The massive mosaic, made up of more than 3,000 individual images, has also been added to ESA’s ESASky app, an interactive map of the whole sky with an easy-to-use interface that enables members of the public to view stunning images of the sky. Universe It was captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Hubble Space Telescope.
the Orion Nebula Filled with budding stars contained within their spiraling clouds of molecular gas. About 2,800 young stars are known to exist within nebulaalong with many others Star embryos cocoon Within the region’s dense veil of gas and dust. The James Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared camera, known as NIRCam for short, is able to look through much of this gas and dust, revealing protostellar disks, outflows of young stars, and even free-floating planets.
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On a winter night, the nebula is visible to the naked eye as a mysterious object beneath the three stars that make up the star’s belt. Orion constellation. The nebula is illuminated by the Trapezium Cluster, a group of young stars named after the pattern of its four most prominent members. Each star in this quartet is massive, with a mass between 15 and 30 times the mass of our Sun. Their short lives, which last only a few million years instead of billions, will end Supernova Explosions.
There are up to a thousand faint stars lurking in the Trapezium Cluster as well, some of which contain circumstellar evaporating disks, disks of gas and dust from which planets emerged. Now, the remaining gas from this planetary formation is being blown away by the stellar winds of the newly awakened stars.
However, not all planets born in the Trapezium have parent stars; The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered about 40 pairs of floating gas giant planets, or… Jupiter Mass Binary Objects (JuMBOs).
Free-floating planets have been found in the Orion Nebula before, but the massive planets were surprising because they seemed to come in pairs. The question astronomers still can’t answer is: Did massive objects (and other free-floating planets) form directly from the Orion Nebula’s gas as failed stars, or were they plucked from a planetary system, perhaps by the universe? gravity For a nearby star to snatch them from their orbits?
The new mosaic is divided between longer and shorter wavelengths. NIRCam’s short-wavelength channel, which covers the infrared waveband between 0.6 and 2.3 microns, is closest to the visible red end of the spectrum and achieves the greatest angular resolution the James Webb Space Telescope can achieve. The short-wavelength mosaic shows every minute detail of the nebula’s star-forming activity.
Meanwhile, the longer-wavelength NIRCam channel, covering 2.4 to 5.0 microns, recorded a network of dust and filaments of organic compounds, known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, that abound in the Orion Nebula. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are carbon-based molecules that make up a good portion of the universe’s ubiquitous dust, and observations like those of the Orion Nebula are teaching astronomers how these ubiquitous molecules form. Given how interstellar dust is recycled into the next generation of stars, the abundance of PAHs has a role that JWST’s infrared viewing could reveal.
In particular, the greater spectral resolution of JWST can detect PAHs on smaller spatial scales than ever before, helping to determine how they accumulate depending on their molecular size, shape and electrical charge.
The Orion Nebula is one of those rare objects that is accessible for inspection by everyone, from stargazers with basic observing equipment to the most advanced. space Telescopes. As Orion rises this winter, what can you see in the greatest nebula in the sky?
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