Orion 'a bustling cauldron of activity'

A nice short read from cnn.com...


Failed stars, baby stars and vast cosmic canyons of dust and gas were on display in a new Hubble Space Telescope image of the Orion Nebula released on Wednesday.

"Orion is a bustling caldron of activity," Jennifer Wiseman of NASA said in a statement released with the image at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

The most eye-catching feature of the image may be the caverns of light where thousands of stars are forming. More than 3,000 stars of various sizes are apparent.

For the first time, Hubble was able to spot young brown dwarf stars -- cool objects too small to be ordinary stars because they lack the ability to sustain nuclear fusion in their cores as the sun does. They are also known as failed stars.

Orion is a good place to study how stars are born because it is only 1,500 light-years away, a relative stone's throw in astronomical terms.

A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.

The Hubble, the world's first space-based optical telescope, was deployed in 1990.

Here is the article on this topic from universe today:

www.universetoday.com/am/publish/best_orion_nebula.html?1112006

and image:

www.universetoday.com/am/uploads/2006-0111orion-full.jpg

pretty fantastic.

Beautiful picture!!!

www.universetoday.com/am/uploads/2006-0111orion-full.jpg

A pity the Hubble's batteries run out in 2007/2008 and after that - darkness !!!