Orion Nebula

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured an unprecedented look at the Orion Nebula, a turbulent stellar nursery that is one of astronomy's most photogenic celestial regions. Newborn stars reside in a dramatic dust-and-gas landscape of plateaus, mountains, and valleys that are reminiscent of the Grand Canyon. The crisp image reveals a tapestry of star formation, from the dense pillars of gas and dust that may be the homes of fledgling stars to the hot, young, massive stars that have emerged from their gas-and-dust cocoons and are shaping the nebula with their powerful ultraviolet light.

The Orion Nebula is a perfect laboratory to study how stars are born because it is 1,500 light-years away, a relatively short distance within our 100,000 light-year wide galaxy. Astronomers have a clear view into this crowded stellar maternity ward because massive stars in the center of the nebula have blown out most of the dust and gas in which they formed, carving a cavity in the dark cloud. In this bowl of stars, we see the entire star formation history of Orion printed into the features of the nebula: arcs, blobs, pillars, and rings of dust that resemble cigar smoke. Each feature tells a story of stellar winds from young stars that impact the stellar environment and the material ejected from other stars. Our Sun was probably born 4.5 billion years ago in such a cloud.