Spitzer and Hubble Create Colorful Masterpiece
Orion, seen from Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI
+ Full image and caption
November 07, 2006
A new image from NASA's Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes looks more like an
abstract painting than a cosmic snapshot. The masterpiece shows the Orion nebula in
an explosion of infrared, ultraviolet and visible-light colors. It was "painted" by
hundreds of baby stars on a canvas of gas and dust, with intense ultraviolet light
and strong stellar winds as brushes.
At the heart of the artwork is a set of four monstrously massive stars, collectively
called the Trapezium. These behemoths are approximately 100,000 times brighter than our
sun. Their community can be identified as the yellow smudge near the center of the composite.
The swirls of green were revealed by Hubble's ultraviolet and visible-light detectors.
They are hydrogen and sulfur gases heated by intense ultraviolet radiation from
the Trapezium's stars.
Wisps of red and orange detected by Spitzer indicate infrared light from illuminated
clouds containing carbon-rich molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. On Earth,
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are found on burnt toast and in automobile exhaust.
Additional stars in Orion are sprinkled throughout the image in a rainbow of colors.
Spitzer exposed infant stars deeply embedded in a cocoon of dust and gas (orange-yellow dots).
Hubble found less embedded stars (specks of green) and stars in the foreground (blue). Stellar
winds from clusters of newborn stars scattered throughout the cloud etched all the well-defined
ridges and cavities.
Located nearly 1,500 light-years away from Earth, the Orion nebula is the brightest spot in
the sword of the hunter constellation. The cosmic cloud is also our closest massive star-formation
factory, and astronomers suspect that it contains about 1,000 young stars.
The Orion constellation can be seen in the fall and winter night skies from northern latitudes.
The constellation's nebula is invisible to the unaided eye, but can be resolved with binoculars
or small telescopes.
This image is a false-color composite, in which light detected at wavelengths of 0.43, 0.50,
and 0.53 microns is blue. Light with wavelengths of 0.6, 0.65, and 0.91 microns is green.
Light of 3.6 microns is orange, and 8-micron light is red.
To view the new false-color image, visit
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/pia01322.html
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission
for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer
Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, which manages JPL for NASA.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European
Space Agency. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations.
The Institute is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy,
Inc., Washington.
For more information about Spitzer, visit http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer or http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer.
For more information about Hubble, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/hubble or http://hubblesite.org.
Media contact: Whitney Clavin (818) 354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
2006-136
