The Orion Nebula is one of the brightest nebulae to us, and is clearly visible to the naked eye in the night sky. It is located at a distance of around 1,630 lightyears away, and is the closest region of massive star formation to Earth, which astronomers believe contains more than 3,000 young stars.
Many very young stars are less than one million years old, and the nebula comprises a diameter of 14 lightyears across (one lightyear is the distance light travels in a single year, about 6 trillion miles).
The constellation of Orion, in which the Orion Nebula resides, contains two of the ten brightest stars in the night sky: Rigel (a blue-white supergiant), which is some 773 lightyears away and up to 100,000 times as bright as the sun, with the next brightest being Betelgeuse (a red supergiant), 500 lightyears from Earth. Alnilam, Mintaka and Alnitak, which form Orion’s belt, are the most prominent stars in the Orion constellation. The three pyramids on the Giza Plateau simulate the alignment of these three stars, with the air shafts inside the pyramids pointing directly towards Orion. In ancient Egyptian mythology, they are believed to be there to project the pharaoh’s soul toward Orion. While this theory remains a theory, the relationship between the stars and the pyramids is quite uncanny.
This striking composite shows five monstrously massive stars at the centre of the cloud, collectively called the Trapezium Cluster and discovered by Galileo Galilei. Maybe in a few hundred million years, there will be planets like the Earth forming around some of the new stars in the cluster!
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Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team
