ASTRONOMY PICTURE

OF THE DAY

EXPLANATION

The stars of Orion shine brightly in visible light in planet Earth’s night sky. The constellation harbors the closest large stellar nursery, the Great Nebula of Orion, a mere 1,500 light-years away. In fact, the apparently bright clump of stars near the center of this false color Chandra x-ray telescope picture are the massive stars of the Trapezium—the young star cluster which powers much of the nebula’s visible-light glow. The stars shown in blue and orange are young sun-like stars; prodigious sources of x-rays thought to be produced in hot stellar coronae and surface flares in a young star’s strong magnetic field. Our middle-aged Sun itself was probably thousands of times brighter in x-rays when, like the Trapezium stars, it was only a few million years old. The x-ray image spans about 2.5 light-years across the central region of the Orion Nebula.

Credit

E.Feigelson & K.Getman (PSU) et al., CXO, NASA