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Credit & Copyright: Data:
Hubble Legacy Archive,
Processing:
Robert Gendler
Explanation:
What lies in the heart of Orion?
Trapezium: four bright stars, that can be found near the center of this sharp cosmic portrait.
Gathered within a region about 1.5 light-years in radius,
these stars dominate the core of the dense
Orion Nebula Star Cluster.
Ultraviolet ionizing radiation from the
Trapezium stars,
mostly from the brightest star
Theta-1
Orionis C
powers the complex star forming region's entire visible glow.
About three million years old, the Orion Nebula Cluster was
even more compact in its younger years and a
dynamical study indicates that
runaway stellar collisions
at an earlier age may have formed a black hole
with more than 100 times the mass of
the Sun.
The presence of a
black hole within the cluster
could explain the observed high velocities of the
Trapezium stars.
The Orion Nebula's distance of some 1,500
light-years make it one of the
closest candidate black holes to Earth.
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& Michigan Tech. U.
Based on Astronomy Picture
Of the Day
Publications with keywords: Orion
Publications with words: Orion
See also: