HUBBLE'S
SHARPEST VIEW OF THE ORION NEBULA
 This
dramatic image of the Orion Nebula (M42) represents
the sharpest view ever taken of this region. It
was imaged with the Advanced Camera for Surveys
(ACS) aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. More
than 3,000 stars of various sizes appear in this
image. These stars reside in a dramatic dust-and-gas
landscape of plateaus, mountains, and valleys.
The Orion Nebula is a picture book of star formation,
from the massive, young stars that are shaping the
nebula to the pillars of dense gas that may be the
homes of budding stars. The bright central region
is the home of the four heftiest stars in the nebula.
The stars are called the Trapezium because they
are arranged in a trapezoid pattern. Ultraviolet
light unleashed by these stars is carving a cavity
in the nebula and disrupting the growth of hundreds
of smaller stars. Located near the Trapezium are
stars still young enough to have disks of material
encircling them. These disks are called protoplanetary
disks or "proplyds" and are too small
to see in this image. The disks are the building
blocks of solar systems.
The bright glow at upper left is from M43, a small
region being shaped by a massive, young star's ultraviolet
light. Next to M43 are dense, dark pillars of dust
and gas that point toward the Trapezium. These pillars
are resisting erosion from the Trapezium's intense
ultraviolet light. The glowing region on the right
reveals arcs and bubbles formed when stellar winds
- streams of charged particles ejected from the
Trapezium stars -- collide with material.
The Orion Nebula is 1,500 light-years away, the
nearest star-forming region to Earth. Astronomers
used 520 Hubble images, taken in five colors in
2004 and 2005, to make this picture. They also added
ground-based photos to fill in missing corners of
the nebula. The ACS mosaic covers approximately
30 arc minutes, the apparent angular size of the
full moon.
Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope
Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope
Orion Treasury Project Team
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