Depth 33 · Stellar nursery

Orion Nebula

The Orion Nebula is a glowing cloud of gas and dust in Orion's sword and the closest large region of massive star formation to Earth. Hundreds of young stars, many brown dwarfs and planet-forming disks make it one of the best places to watch stars being born.

Fact sheet

Type

Emission nebula (H II region) around a young star cluster

Distance

About 1,300 light-years from the Sun (estimates range from about 1,270 to 1,350)

Size

About 24 light-years across

Constellation

Orion

Position in the sky

Right ascension 5h 35m, declination −5° 23′

Seeing it from Earth

Visible to the naked eye from a reasonably dark site as a fuzzy patch below Orion's belt, best in the evening sky around January (northern winter); binoculars or a small telescope show the glowing gas and the Trapezium stars.

On the voyage

Depth 33, in the Milky Way section of the route, between Betelgeuse and the Ring Nebula

Things to know

• The nebula is the nearest large star-forming region to Earth, and at its heart sits the Trapezium, four massive young stars whose ultraviolet light shapes the cloud. NASA
• Deep infrared images from ESO's Very Large Telescope released in 2016 revealed about ten times as many brown dwarfs and planet-sized free-floating objects as had been known there. ESO
• Hubble's sharpest view of the nebula was stitched together from 520 separate exposures and holds more than a billion pixels. NASA
• The James Webb Space Telescope has studied the Orion Bar, a ridge where ultraviolet light from the Trapezium eats into dense gas, and found a planet-forming disk there called d203-506. NASA
• You can find it with your eyes alone as a fuzzy patch in Orion's sword, just below the three stars of the belt. NASA

Sources

• NASA Science (Hubble) – Messier 42 (The Orion Nebula)
• ESO – Deepest Ever Look into Orion (eso1625)
• NASA Night Sky Network – A Flame in the Sky: The Orion Nebula
• Kuhn et al. 2019, ApJ – Kinematics in Young Star Clusters and Associations with Gaia DR2 (arXiv)