The Orion Nebula’s Biggest Stars

Packed into the center of this region are bright lights of the Trapezium stars, the four heftiest stars in the Orion Nebula. Ultraviolet light unleashed by these stars is carving a cavity in the nebula and disrupting the growth of hundreds of smaller stars. The dark speck near the bottom, right of the image is a silhouette of an edge-on disk encircling a young star. Another whitish-looking disk is visible near the bottom, left, just above the two bright stars. This disk is encased in a bubble of gas and dust.

About the colours

This image is a composite mosaic of many separate expposures made by the ACS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope and the ESO La Silla 2.2 meter telescope using several different filters isolating the light of specific elements or of specific broad wavelength ranges. The color arises by assigning different hues (colors), to each monochromatic image. In this case, the colors are:Blue: ACS F435W (B) + ESO BB#B/99_ESO842 BGreen: ACS F555W (V) + ESO NB#OIII/8_ESO859 [O III]Red-orange: ACS F658N (Halpha) Red: ACS F775W (i) + F850LP (z) + ESO NB#Halpha/7_ESO856 + ESO NB#SIIr/8_ESO857 [S II]

About the data

The Hubble image was created from HST data from proposal 10246 : M. Robberto (STScI/ESA), C.R. O'Dell (Vanderbilt University), L.A. Hillenbrand (Caltech), M. Simon (SUNY Stony Brook), P. McCullough (STScI), J. Krist (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), F. Palla (Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri), M. Romaniello (ESO – Germany), J. Najita (NOAO/AURA), E.D. Feigelson (The Pennsylvania State University), R. Makidon (STScI), J. Stauffer (Jet Propulsion Laboratory); N. Panagia, I.N. Reid, D.R. Soderblom, and E. Bergeron (STScI); and K.G. Stassun (Vanderbilt University).

The Hubble data was superimposed onto a ground-based image taken from the 2.2 meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory – La Silla.