Orion Star Nursery
Hi my name is Massimo Robberto. I am a European Space Agency scientist working with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Your task is to make pictures of one of the most amazing objects in our galaxy - the Orion Nebula.
The Orion Nebula is a vast cloud of gas and dust only 1,500 light years from Earth –that’s next door in space terms. It is in the same arm of the Milky Way that we are. It is also below us so that there are very few stars getting in the way of our view and very little behind it. The Orion Nebula is a very young object – no more than 10 million years old. So young that the massive stars at its centre have not had time to run out of fuel which they will do in only a few million years. There is no better place to study star formation. We have already taken a peek with the Hubble Space Telescope. Now I am planning a project that will use the HST to look at the Orion Nebula in even greater details to answer some of the many mysteries about star formation.
Take three images of the Orion Nebula in different wavelengths using HST’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2
The diagonal length of the image will be 1.6 light-years. To see the structure of the nebula, three filters are used which target the light given off by excited hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen atoms. The filter that isolates emission from Nitrogen is encoded in the red channel, Hydrogen is encoded is the green channel and Oxygen is encoded in the blue channel.
Save each image in your work file and then import them into Registax. Adjust the result until you see the greatest amount of detail.
Analysing your Results
Check your result with
ours
.
Now take a picture of the nebula in infra red light using the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). The gas and dust clouds are largely invisible to IR so we are able to see inside the cloud.
RESULTS
Click here -
- to see
our go at combining the images with RegiStax.
Here are some questions that your images should help you answer:
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What are the blobs?
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Why is one of them black?
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Why can you see the trapezium stars in visible light but not most of the other stars?
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What shape is the centre of the nebula and how did it form?
Some important facts about stars to remember:
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The bigger they are, the brighter they shine, the quicker they use their fuel and the shorter they live.
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Small stars take a while to form, don't use their nuclear fuel quickly and live longer.
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Hot stars give off lots of ultraviolet radiation.
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Ultraviolet radiation can sweep away gas and dust clouds.
We have prepared a PowerPoint viewer show that will allow you to flick backwards and forwards between the original images and the combined one. I'll also tell you the answers to the questions.
Fly though the Orion Nebula - an animation based on our data. See inside one of those blobs!
Learn more about how solar system forms with Inga Kamp's PLANET BIRTH challenge
Discover Orion like bubbles in other galaxies with Jesus Maiz's GALACTIC FIREWORKS challenge