M42 - Orion Nebula - Deep Sky Videos

we're almost right next door we're in the same spiral arm in the Milky Way as the Earth's and the solar system lives in but we're about 1,500 light-years away in the night sky in the winter Orion is a very easy constellation to see even from fairly light polluted cities and it's very easy to recognize because it just looks so much like what it's supposed to be which is a hunter you see a red star which is a shoulder a blue star which is the foot you see a line of three stars with his belt and hanging from those stars is a sword and in the middle of this sword there's this fuzzy blob is probably the most widely photographed deep sky object in the sky because it's visible from North and South hemisphere it's an amateur astronomers dream because it's a big and bright and colorful and interesting nebula is visible to the naked eye and it's one of the very few deep sky objects that would show some form of color well a nebula is a fairly vague term which can actually encompass a quite a wide variety of different astronomical objects in this particular case we're talking about a stellar nursery this is a vast cloud of gas and dust in which stars are being born what's good about Orion is it allows us to study star formation really in quite protein quite close proximity you know it's so close we can look at the big bright stars in Orion that can also see the small stars and also brown dwarves this kind of failed stars that didn't quite make it into becoming real stars at the heart of this is a very young star cluster called the trapezium and it's a conglomeration of thousands of young stars all sitting within about four light-years of each other so that's that many stars packed into the distance between our Sun and the next closest star Proxima Centauri that's a lot of stars and the intense radiation from these hot young stars has essentially blown a cavern out of this nebula which is why we can see down into it the brightest star is called theta 1 C orianna's it's about 30 times an hour the sand so it's a real big boy but it's just that one star is the thing that produces the eye nebula because it's the hottest star the most massive star in Orion and so actually if it wasn't for those big stars in the middle there wouldn't be in a Ryan Nebula they're kind of switching on they're very hot energetic stars and they're firing copious amounts of high-energy radiation back into the nebula we can see these incredible arms of gas and dust and these have to be coaxed out sometimes for the image you have to apply certain image processing techniques to help enhance that to bring it out but this make that's what makes these images very personal I've also image this with the forks telescope this is a 2 meter class robotic telescope situate on the mountaintop in Hawaii 10,000 feet rather amusingly I'd booked a time on the telescope forgetting there was a full moon in the sky and this can cause a lot of problems the brightness of the full moon can affect our images and use the narrow band filters again same as with my own image to produce a very detailed view of just this area around here you can see the incredible resolution of the forks telescopes we can see the four main stars here but there's a whole host of other stars actually very very difficult to see visually these you really would only see these on the best night with a large telescope these are hot young violent stars and it's the energy from these stars which is causing all this to glow we'll also see some interesting some jet-like effects that the Hubble telescope causes imaged incredibly well this is the beautiful image taken by an amateur astronomer and we've got a Ryan but looking a bit different from normal because it's a very deep exposure this entire region is populated by this huge reservoir of cold molecular gas hydrogen gas and so the Ryan Nebula is just one part of that region that's forming stars but the other regions of star formation will take place elsewhere Narayan in the coming million years so we really are looking at just one bit of this giant reservoir of gas that's currently forming stars it's only a few light years across so it's really quite a small place it's just so close it looks quite big one of the famous things about this nebula is the protoplanetary disc so it's not just stars that are being formed but possibly solar systems as well so if we look the m42 with the Hubble Space Telescope which they have done in exquisite detail you can see these protoplanetary discs or prep lids which they're called which are actually the very earliest stages of a solar system being formed around a brand-new hot young star and so this is a disk of dust and debris and gas that is likely going to coalesce into a solar system and the fact that you find so many of these so over a hundred just in the Orion Nebula sort of indicates that the formation of the solar system is probably a fairly common thing so it gives us a little bit of perspective on where we lie in the universe and how special we are which is probably not very this is a Whirlpool Galaxy a faraway galaxy this is a Hubble image of the Whirlpool and this is the center a lot of old stars these are spiral arms and the pink things here are things like a Ryan if that's a Ryan's going to be kind of a fairy piddly one more like that one so really Orion is just one of many regions of star formation in the Milky Way it's just it's just for us it's really close by you

Channel: DeepSkyVideos

Views: 219,385

Rating: 4.931818 out of 5

Keywords: astronomers, messier, space, galaxies, nebula, nebulae, stars, universe, deepsky, deepskyvideos, deep sky, telescope, Messier, Messier Objects, Messier Catalog, Messier Catalogue

Id: KOXm7W8f6wo

Length: 5min 45sec (345 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2012