Orion Nebula

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows a small region of the Great Nebula in Orion. The Orion Nebula is one of the nearest regions of very recent star formation. The nebula is a giant gas cloud illuminated by the brightest of the young hot stars on the right side of the picture. Many of the fainter young stars are surrounded by disks of dust and gas that are slightly more than twice the diameter of the solar system. The great plume of gas in the upper left in this picture is the result of the ejection of material from a recently formed star. The brightest portions are "hills" on the surface of the nebula, and the long bright bar is where Earth observers look along a long "wall" on a gaseous surface. The diagonal length of the image is 1.6 light-years. Red light depicts emission in nitrogen, green is hydrogen, and blue is oxygen.