The Orion Nebula: New Wide-angled Views | James Webb Space Telescope

The Orion Nebula: New Wide-angled Views | James Webb Space Telescope

Orion Nebula in NIRCam short-wavelength channel

An image of a young star-forming region filled with wispy blue, grey, green, and red nebulosity that is brightest towards the center and fainter towards the edges, especially in the top left corner and on the right side. Thousands of stars are seen sprinkled across the field, concentrated towards the center, and the brightest stars show the eight spikes due to diffraction that are characteristic of Webb images.

Orion Nebula in NIRCam long-wavelength channel

An image of a young star-forming region filled with with wispy purple, green, and red nebulosity. The purple ionized gas is seen mostly towards the center, with browns, greens, and reds behind, while the periphery is mostly bright green and darker brown to the left. There is a large spray of yellow, orange, red, and purple towards the top center, and the nebula fades to near black to the right. There are thousands of stars sprinkled across the field, concentrated towards the center, but they generally appear fainter at longer wavelengths, with exceptions. The brightest sources in the field have extensive diffraction spikes characteristic of Webb.

The Orion Nebula lies roughly 1,300 light-years from Earth in the so-called 'sword' of the constellation of Orion the Hunter, and the image shows a region that is 4 by 2.75-light years in size, smaller than the distance between Earth and our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri.

This young star-forming region is just a million years old and contains thousands of new stars spanning a range of masses from 40 down to less than 0.1 times the mass of the Sun. The region also contains many brown dwarfs, objects below seven percent of the mass of the Sun. They are too small to start nuclear fusion in their cores. And below that, starting at roughly 13 times the mass of Jupiter, lie planetary-mass objects. These new Webb data have revealed hundreds of such objects, floating freely in the nebula, not orbiting stars, the very smallest of which have just 60% the mass of Jupiter or two times the mass of Saturn.

One of the brightest nebulae in the night sky is Messier 42, the Orion Nebula, located south of Orion’s belt. At its core is the young Trapezium Cluster of stars, the most massive of which illuminate the surrounding gas and dust with their intense ultraviolet radiation fields, while protostars continue to form today in the OMC-1 molecular cloud behind.

The nebula is a treasure trove for astronomers studying the formation and early evolution of stars, with a rich diversity of phenomena and objects, including: outflows and planet-forming disks around young stars; embedded protostars; brown dwarfs; free-floating planetary mass objects; and photodissociation regions—the interface regions where the radiation from the massive stars heats, shapes and influences the chemistry of the gas.

The new imaging was obtained with Webb’s near-infrared camera, NIRCam, and has been made into two mosaics, one each from the short and long wavelength channels. The short-wavelength mosaic maximises Webb’s angular resolution to reveal beautiful details in discs and outflows, while the long-wavelength one showcases the intricate network of dust and organic compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. 

Webb is an international partnership between NASA, the ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

Credits: NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), Canadian Space Agency (CSA)

Science Leads & Image Processing: M. McCaughrean, S. Pearson, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Release Date: Oct. 2, 2023

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