What It Is
M42, the Orion Nebula, is the closest large star-forming region to Earth. It is a vast cloud of gas and dust where new stars are being born, bright enough to see as a hazy patch in Orion's sword under dark skies.
History
The Orion Nebula has been noticed by many cultures because of its brightness and its prominent position below Orion's belt. NASA notes that the Maya likened it to a cosmic fire of creation, an apt image for a stellar nursery where young stars are shaping the surrounding gas.
Science Notes
- M42 is only about 1,500 light-years away, making it the nearest large stellar nursery to Earth.
- Its central Trapezium stars flood the nebula with ultraviolet light, carving a cavity and disrupting nearby star formation.
- Hubble's Orion Nebula mosaic used hundreds of exposures and contains more than a billion pixels.
- The nebula is bright enough to see without a telescope from a dark site, but a telescope reveals structure around the star-forming core.
- distance
- 1,500 light-years
- apparentMagnitude
- 4.0
- constellation
- Orion
- objectType
- Nebula
- notableFeature
- The Trapezium cluster of massive young stars
- bestObserved
- January from mid-northern latitudes
