Peering into the Orion Nebula

In this composite image, the central region of Orion is seen as never before through NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope.
The bright point-like sources (blue and orange) in this image are the burgeoning stars captured in X-ray light by a long series of Chandra observations. These nearly continuous observations, lasting almost 13 days, allowed astronomers to monitor the activity of Sun-like stars between 1 and 10 million years old.

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. The wispy filaments (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.

Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State/E.Feigelson & K.Getman et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/M. Robberto et al.
High resolution image

In this composite image, the central region of Orion is seen as never before through NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope.




Image Credit: NASA/CXC/Penn State/E.Feigelson & K.Getman et al.
High resolution image

This Chandra image shows the Orion Nebula Cluster, a rich cluster of young stars observed almost continuously for 13 days. The long observation enabled scientists to study the X-ray behavior of young Sun-like stars with ages between 1 and 10 million years. They discovered that these young stars produce violent X-ray outbursts, or flares, that are much more frequent and energetic than anything seen today from our 4.6 billion-year-old Sun.

Source: Chandra X-ray Center
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