Chandra Release - October 3, 2007

Visual Description: Orion Nebula

  The image features a stunning view of the Orion Nebula, capturing the intricate details of the nebula, and showcasing softer shades of purple, pink, blue, pale gold and white. At the center of the nebula, there is a bright, star-forming region riddled with white pops of light.  The image looks dense and filled in, with glowing gas and dust, some dark and dusty clumps, and bright sources that look like many white holiday lights scattered across the image.  In this composite image, data was combined from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope.  Bright point-like sources in blue and orange are the newly formed stars captured in X-ray light by a long series of Chandra observations. The fledgling stars were seen to flare in their X-ray intensity much more than our Sun does today. This suggests our Sun had many violent and energetic outbursts when it was much younger. Wispy filaments (in pink and purple) are clouds of gas and dust as seen by Hubble in optical light. This gas and dust will one day condense into disks of material from which future generations of stars will be born.