Webb Telescope Captures The Most Beautiful Object In The Night Sky In Jaw-Dropping New Release

It’s one of the most incredible naked eye sites in the night sky—and it’s now been imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The Orion Nebula—also known as M42—is a stellar nursery, home to newborn stars. It’s the closest such region to us in space and maybe, just maybe, where our own star, the Sun, formed about 4.5 billion years ago.

A diffuse cloud of gas and dust about 1,300 light-years distant, this brightest nebula of all is part of “Orion’s Sword” that hangs down from Orion’s Belt.

The images published today are of something beautifully complex, yet so simple—space being heated by starlight.

The images here are composites that use JWST’s NIRCam instrument’s filters to isolate different wavelengths of light reflected from ionized gas, hydrocarbons, molecular gas, dust and scattered starlight.

In the main image, above, you can see the Orion Bar, a ridge of dense gas and dust that’s lit-up by hot, young massive stars of the nearby Trapezium Cluster, just out of shot.

An area of space that gets zapped with ultraviolet (UV) radiation from massive young stars—or, put more simply, is heated by starlight—is what astronomers call a Photo-Dissociation Region (PDR).

PDRs are of intense interest because they’re the best place to find clues as to how stars and planets are created.

In the main image, annotated above, it’s possible to see four incredible cosmic sights:

  • A baby star in its cocoon (top, right): disks of gas and dust around a young star called HST-10 that may be forming planets.
  • Filaments (bottom, right): meandering filaments rich in hydrocarbon molecules and molecular hydrogen fill most of the image.
  • Theta2 Orionis (θ2 Orionis A) (center): a multiple star system whose light is illuminating dust behind it.
  • A baby star in a globule (center, left): gravitationally unstable clouds of gas and dust collapse into embryos that slowly grow in size before becoming shining nuclear fusion reactors.

The images come from the Photo-Dissociation Regions For All Early Science Release (PDRs4All ERS) team, researchers that use humanity’s most advanced telescopes to study these hot, ionized environments.

As well as being compared, above, to previous images of the region taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, the Orion Bar was last week captured by the same PDRs4All team using the W. M. Keck Observatory on Hawaiʻi Island.

Here’s that image from Keck, below, again compared to Hubble’s effort:

“Observing PDRs is like looking into our past,” said Emilie Habart, an Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale associate professor at Paris-Saclay University and lead author of a paper on this study. “These regions are important because they allow us to understand how young stars influence the gas and dust cloud they are born in, particularly sites where stars, like the Sun, form.”

The above image (right-hand side) helped the team plan the JWST images you see here.

As a bonus the PDRs4All ERS team also published this incredibly beautiful image of the northern region of the Orion Nebula that again shows its incredible filaments:

You can see the Orion Nebula with your own eyes right now if you get up at hour before dawn and look east. It’s in the constellation of Orion, “the Hunter.”

It looks like a fuzzy patch of diffuse light and is just beside Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka—the three stars of Orion’s Belt, which is between ruddy star Betelgeuse and blue star Rigel. Although you can see it with the naked eye the Orion Nebula is best seen through a pair of binoculars or a small telescope.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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