NASA : Spitzer's Orion

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Spitzer's Orion

Few cosmic vistas excite the imagination like the Orion Nebula, an immense stellar nursery some 1,500 light-years away. This stunning false-color view spans about 40 light-years across the region, constructed using infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Compared to its visual wavelength appearance, the brightest portion of the nebula is likewise centered on Orion's young, massive, hot stars, known as the Trapezium Cluster. But the infrared image also detects the nebula's many protostars, still in the process of formation, seen here in red hues. In fact, red spots along the dark dusty filament to the left of the bright cluster include the protostar cataloged as HOPS 68, recently found to have crystals of the silicate mineral olivine within its protostellar envelope.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
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NASA - Asteroid Zips By Orion Nebula

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Asteroid Zips By Orion Nebula

This image shows the potentially hazardous near-Earth object 1998 KN3 as it zips past a cloud of dense gas and dust near the Orion nebula. NEOWISE, the asteroid-hunting portion of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, mission, snapped infrared pictures of the asteroid, seen as the yellow-green dot at upper left. Because asteroids are warmed by the sun to roughly room temperature, they glow brightly at the infrared wavelengths used by WISE.
Astronomers use infrared light from asteroids to measure their sizes, and when combined with visible-light observations, they can also measure the reflectivity of their surfaces. The WISE infrared data reveal that this asteroid is about .7 mile (1.1 kilometers) in diameter and reflects only about 7 percent of the visible light that falls on its surface, which means it is relatively dark.
In this image, blue denotes shorter infrared wavelengths, and red, longer. Hotter objects emit shorter-wavelength light, so they appear blue. The blue stars, for example, have temperatures of thousands of degrees. The coolest gas and dust appears red. The asteroid appears yellow in the image because it is about room temperature: cooler than the distant stars, but warmer than the dust.
JPL manages the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
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NASA - NASA Spacecraft Reactivated to Hunt for Asteroids

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This artist's concept shows the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE spacecraft, in its orbit around Earth. In September of 2013, engineers will attempt to bring the mission out of hibernation to hunt for more asteroids and comets in a project called NEOWISE.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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This image shows the potentially hazardous near-Earth object 1998 KN3 as it zips past a cloud of dense gas and dust near the Orion nebula.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Probe Will Assist Agency in Search for Candidates to Explore
PASADENA, Calif. -- A NASA spacecraft that discovered and characterized tens of thousands of asteroids throughout the solar system before being placed in hibernation will return to service for three more years starting in September, assisting the agency in its effort to identify the population of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects, as well as those suitable for asteroid exploration missions.
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) will be revived next month with the goal of discovering and characterizing near-Earth objects (NEOs), space rocks that can be found orbiting within 28 million miles (45 million kilometers) from Earth's path around the sun. NASA anticipates WISE will use its 16-inch (40-centimeter) telescope and infrared cameras to discover about 150 previously unknown NEOs and characterize the size, albedo and thermal properties of about 2,000 others -- including some which could be candidates for the agency's recently announced asteroid initiative.
"The WISE mission achieved its mission's goals and as NEOWISE extended the science even further in its survey of asteroids. NASA is now extending that record of success, which will enhance our ability to find potentially hazardous asteroids, and support the new asteroid initiative," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science in Washington. "Reactivating WISE is an excellent example of how we are leveraging existing capabilities across the agency to achieve our goal."
NASA's asteroid initiative will be the first mission to identify, capture and relocate an asteroid. It represents an unprecedented technological feat that will lead to new scientific discoveries and technological capabilities that will help protect our home planet. The asteroid initiative brings together the best of NASA's science, technology and human exploration efforts to achieve President Obama's goal of sending humans to an asteroid by 2025.
Launched in December 2009 to look for the glow of celestial heat sources from asteroids, stars and galaxies, WISE made about 7,500 images every day during its primary mission, from January 2010 to February 2011. As part of a project called NEOWISE, the spacecraft made the most accurate survey to date of NEOs. NASA turned most of WISE's electronics off when it completed its primary mission.
"The data collected by NEOWISE two years ago have proven to be a gold mine for the discovery and characterization of the NEO population," said Lindley Johnson, NASA's NEOWISE program executive in Washington. "It is important that we accumulate as much of this type of data as possible while the WISE spacecraft remains a viable asset."
Because asteroids reflect but do not emit visible light, infrared sensors are a powerful tool for discovering, cataloging and understanding the asteroid population. Depending on an object's reflectivity, or albedo, a small, light-colored space rock can look the same as a big, dark one. As a result, data collected with optical telescopes using visible light can be deceiving.
During 2010, NEOWISE observed about 158,000 rocky bodies out of approximately 600,000 known objects. Discoveries included 21 comets, more than 34,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and 135 near-Earth objects.
The WISE prime mission was to scan the entire celestial sky in infrared light. It captured more than 2.7 million images in multiple infrared wavelengths and cataloged more than 560 million objects in space, ranging from galaxies faraway to asteroids and comets much closer to Earth.
"The team is ready and after a quick checkout, we're going to hit the ground running," said Amy Mainzer, NEOWISE principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "NEOWISE not only gives us a better understanding of the asteroids and comets we study directly, but it will help us refine our concepts and mission operation plans for future, space-based near-Earth object cataloging missions."
JPL manages WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington. The mission is part of NASA's Explorers Program, which NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., built the spacecraft. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
More information about NEOWISE is available online at:
http://www.nasa.gov/wise
and
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise/ .
For more information on the asteroid initiative, visit:
 http://www.nasa.gov/asteroidinitiative .

DC Agle 818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
agle@jpl.nasa.gov
Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
Dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

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NASA - SOFIA Observatory Peers Into Heart of Orion Nebula

This graphical representation from the SOFIA Science Center compares two infrared images of the heart of the Orion nebula captured by the FORCAST camera on the SOFIA airborne observatory's telescope with a wider image of the same area from the Spitzer space telescope. (SOFIA image - James De Buizer / NASA / DLR / USRA / DSI / FORCAST; Spitzer image - NASA/JPL)

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MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. - A new image from NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) shows a complex distribution of interstellar dust and stars in the Orion nebula. Interstellar dust, composed mostly of silicon, carbon and other heavy elements that astronomers refer to generically as "metals," plus some ice and organic molecules, is part of the raw material from which new stars and planets are forming.

The two insets display mid-infrared images showing portions of the Orion nebula star-forming region, also known as Messier 42 (M42). The SOFIA images were produced by SOFIA staff scientist James De Buizer and his collaborators from data obtained in May - June 2011 during the SOFIA's Basic Science program. The observations were made using the Faint Object Infrared Camera for the SOFIA Telescope (FORCAST) instrument, led by principal investigator Terry Herter of Cornell University. Those observations are subjects of scientific papers to be submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.

The SOFIA's large telescope is able to resolve many individual protostars and young stars as well as knots of dust and gas that could be starting the process of gravitational contraction to become stars. The massive protostar known famously as the BN (Becklin-Neugebauer) Object stands out as the individual blue source in the red inset box. The BN/KL region of Orion gets its name from the initials of pioneering infrared astronomers Eric Becklin, Gerry Neugebauer, Doug Kleinmann and Frank Low who mapped it in the late 1960s and early 1970s, using some of the first astronomical infrared detectors. In this image, infrared light with wavelengths of 20, 31, and 37 microns, symbolized respectively by blue, green and red, is seen coming from relatively cool interstellar dust with temperatures of approximately 100 - 200 kelvins.

The SOFIA image in the blue inset box shows the Ney-Allen Nebula, a region of intense infrared emission that was discovered surrounding the luminous Trapezium stars by astronomers Ed Ney and David Allen. Some of the compact features shown here are disks of dust and gas around young solar-mass stars that could be planetary systems in the process of formation. In this image, blue, green and red respectively symbolize infrared light with wavelengths of 8, 20, and 37 microns, coming from material as warm as 500 kelvins (450 F).

The large background image is a composite of data from the Spitzer Space Telescope in which light with wavelengths of 7.9, 4.5, and 3.6 microns (represented respectively by red, green and blue) is emitted from hot dust and gas heated by embedded stars, and from the stars themselves. The BN/KL region is so bright as to be over-exposed in the Spitzer image.

The two SOFIA images were made at combinations of wavelengths and angular resolutions unavailable to any other observatory on the ground or in space. The SOFIA and Spitzer images of Orion together provide a comprehensive view of stages of star formation from cold interstellar clouds to fully-fledged stars.

The SOFIA airborne observatory incorporates a 17-ton reflecting telescope with an effective diameter of 2.5 meters (100 inches) mounted inside an extensively modified Boeing 747SP. The SOFIA aircraft flies at altitudes as high as 45,000 feet (14 km), above more than 99 percent of the water vapor in Earth's atmosphere that blocks most infrared radiation from celestial sources.

The SOFIA is a joint program of NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), and is based and managed at NASA's Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif. NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., manages the SOFIA science and mission operations in cooperation with the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), headquartered in Columbia, Md., and the German SOFIA Institute (DSI) at the University of Stuttgart.

For more information about the SOFIA, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/sofia

For information about SOFIA's science mission, visit:

http://www.sofia.usra.edu

and

http://www.dlr.de/en/sofia

NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

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NASA - NASA Selects Explorer Investigations for Formulation

Hola amigos: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., la Agencia Espacial NASA, nos alcanza la información que: ( NASA's Astrophysics Explorer Program) El Programa de Explorador de Astrofísica de la NASA ha seleccionado dos misiones para el lanzamiento en 2017: un satélite que intentará cazar/detectar   planetas y  además será un un instrumento de  la Estación Internacional Espacial para observar mediante el sistema de rayos X  a las  estrellas.

Asimismo la NASA determinó que :  The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), ha logrado satisfacer las exigencias entre cuatro más para lograr el valor científico y que hagan posible la investigación espacial..

También nos informa que : The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) usará varios telescopios para hacer un estudio completo del espacio y descubrir los exoplanetas que circulan alrededor de gigantescas estrellas compuestas de gas siendo su objetivo detectar planetas similares a La Tierra en la zona de habitabilidad galáctica que probablemente tengan vida como La Tierra. Así lo hizo conocer : George Ricker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Amigos los invito a leer en inglés la versión original de la NASA.........

WISE Feels the Heat from Orion's Sword

02.05.13

 

The Orion nebula is featured in this sweeping image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The constellation of Orion is prominent in the evening sky throughout the world from about December through April of each year. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA 

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The tangle of clouds and stars that lie in Orion's sword is showcased in a new, expansive view from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.

Orion, the famous hunter, is visible in evening skies throughout the world from about December through April. The constellation appears tranquil and still to the naked eye, but lying in its sword, at what appears to be a slightly fuzzy star, is a turbulent cauldron of stellar birth.

WISE scanned the whole sky in infrared light, capturing this vast view of the dynamic region, called the Orion nebula. The telescope picked up the infrared glow from dust heated by newborn stars. The colors green and red highlight this warmed dust, while the white regions are the hottest. Massive stars burned through the dust, carving out cavities, the largest of which is seen at the center of the picture.

Astronomers think that our sun was probably born in a similar cloud some five billion years ago. Over time, the cloud would have dispersed and the stars would have drifted apart, leaving us more isolated in space. The crowded newborn stars in the Orion nebula are less than 10 million years old -- billions of years from now, they will likely spread out.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages, and operated, WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The spacecraft was put into hibernation mode in 2011, after it scanned the entire sky twice, completing its main objectives. Edward Wright is the principal investigator and is at UCLA. The mission was selected competitively under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah. The spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

More information is online at 

http://www.nasa.gov/wise 

 and 

http://wise.astro.ucla.edu 

and  

http://jpl.nasa.gov/wise .

 

 

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

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NASA - The Cosmic Hearth

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

The Orion nebula 

 

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The Cosmic Hearth

The Orion nebula is featured in this sweeping image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The constellation of Orion is prominent in the evening sky throughout the world from about December through April of each year. The nebula (also catalogued as Messier 42) is located in the sword of Orion, hanging from his famous belt of three stars. The star cluster embedded in the nebula is visible to the unaided human eye as a single star, with some fuzziness apparent to the most keen-eyed observers. Because of its prominence, cultures all around the world have given special significance to Orion. The Maya of Mesoamerica envision the lower portion of Orion, his belt and feet (the stars Saiph and Rigel), as being the hearthstones of creation, similar to the triangular three-stone hearth that is at the center of all traditional Maya homes. The Orion nebula, lying at the center of the triangle, is interpreted by the Maya as the cosmic fire of creation surrounded by smoke.

This metaphor of a cosmic fire of creation is apt. The Orion nebula is an enormous cloud of dust and gas where vast numbers of new stars are being forged. It is one of the closest sites of star formation to Earth and therefore provides astronomers with the best view of stellar birth in action. Many other telescopes have been used to study the nebula in detail, finding wonders such as planet-forming disks forming around newly forming stars. WISE was an all-sky survey giving it the ability to see these sites of star formation in a larger context. This view spans more than six times the width of the full moon, covering a region nearly 100 light-years across. In it, we see the Orion nebula surrounded by large amounts of interstellar dust, colored green.

Astronomers now realize that the Orion nebula is part of the larger Orion molecular cloud complex, which also includes the Flame nebula. This complex in our Milky Way galaxy is actively making new stars. It is filled with dust warmed by the light of the new stars within, making the dust glow in infrared light.

Color in this image represents specific infrared wavelengths. Blue represents light emitted at 3.4-micron wavelengths and cyan (blue-green) represents 4.6 microns, both of which come mainly from hot stars. Relatively cooler objects, such as the dust of the nebulae, appear green and red. Green represents 12-micron light and red represents 22-micron light.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
NASA

Read more........
 http://hubblesite.org/gallery/wallpaper/pr2006001a/

Image: Hubble's Sharpest View of the Orion Nebula

STScI-PRC2006-01a

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This dramatic image offers a peek inside a cavern of roiling dust and gas where thousands of stars are forming. The image, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, represents the sharpest view ever taken of this region, called the Orion Nebula. More than 3,000 stars of various sizes appear in this image. Some of them have never been seen in visible light. These stars reside in a dramatic dust-and-gas landscape of plateaus, mountains, and valleys that are reminiscent of the Grand Canyon.
The Orion Nebula is a picture book of star formation, from the massive, young stars that are shaping the nebula to the pillars of dense gas that may be the homes of budding stars. The bright central region is the home of the four heftiest stars in the nebula. The stars are called the Trapezium because they are arranged in a trapezoid pattern. Ultraviolet light unleashed by these stars is carving a cavity in the nebula and disrupting the growth of hundreds of smaller stars. Located near the Trapezium stars are stars still young enough to have disks of material encircling them. These disks are called protoplanetary disks or "proplyds" and are too small to see clearly in this image. The disks are the building blocks of solar systems.
The bright glow at upper left is from M43, a small region being shaped by a massive, young star's ultraviolet light. Astronomers call the region a miniature Orion Nebula because only one star is sculpting the landscape. The Orion Nebula has four such stars. Next to M43 are dense, dark pillars of dust and gas that point toward the Trapezium. These pillars are resisting erosion from the Trapezium's intense ultraviolet light. The glowing region on the right reveals arcs and bubbles formed when stellar winds - streams of charged particles ejected from the Trapezium stars — collide with material.
The faint red stars near the bottom are the myriad brown dwarfs that Hubble spied for the first time in the nebula in visible light. Sometimes called "failed stars," brown dwarfs are cool objects that are too small to be ordinary stars because they cannot sustain nuclear fusion in their cores the way our Sun does. The dark red column, below, left, shows an illuminated edge of the cavity wall.
The Orion Nebula is 1,500 light-years away, the nearest star-forming region to Earth. Astronomers used 520 Hubble images, taken in five colors, to make this picture. They also added ground-based photos to fill out the nebula. The ACS mosaic covers approximately the apparent angular size of the full moon.
The Orion observations were taken between 2004 and 2005.
Object Names: Orion Nebula, M42, NGC 1976
Image Type: Astronomical

Credit: NASA,ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team

NEWS RELEASE IMAGES

All images from this news release:

To access available information and downloadable versions of images in this news release, click on any of the images below:

---

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NASA - LL Ori and the Orion Nebula

 

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LL Ori and the Orion Nebula

This esthetic close-up of cosmic clouds and stellar winds features LL Orionis, interacting with the Orion Nebula flow. Adrift in Orion's stellar nursery and still in its formative years, variable star LL Orionis produces a wind more energetic than the wind from our own middle-aged Sun. As the fast stellar wind runs into slow moving gas a shock front is formed, analogous to the bow wave of a boat moving through water or a plane traveling at supersonic speed.

The small, arcing, graceful structure just above and left of center is LL Ori's cosmic bow shock, measuring about half a light-year across. The slower gas is flowing away from the Orion Nebula's hot central star cluster, the Trapezium, located off the upper left corner of the picture. In three dimensions, LL Ori's wrap-around shock front is shaped like a bowl that appears brightest when viewed along the "bottom" edge. The beautiful picture is part of a large mosaic view of the complex stellar nursery in Orion, filled with a myriad of fluid shapes associated with star formation.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team

NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

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Astronomy: Chaos in the Orion Nebula

Chaos in Orion
Baby stars are creating chaos 1,500 light-years away in the cosmic cloud of the Orion Nebula. Four massive stars make up the bright yellow area in the center of this false-color image for NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Green indicates hydrogen and sulfur gas in the nebula, which is a cocoon of gas and dust. Red and orange indicate carbon-rich molecules. Infant stars appear as yellow dots embedded in the nebula.

Image Credit: NASA
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
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Astronomy: Orion's Rainbow of Infrared Light

Hi My Friends: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG.,This new view of the Orion Nebula highlights fledgling stars hidden in the gas and clouds. It shows infrared observations taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel mission, in which NASA plays an important role.Orion's Rainbow of Infrared Light
This new view of the Orion Nebula highlights fledgling stars hidden in the gas and clouds. It shows infrared observations taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel mission, in which NASA plays an important role.

Stars form as clumps of this gas and dust collapses, creating warm globs of material fed by an encircling disk. These dusty envelopes glow brightest at longer wavelengths, appearing as red dots in this image. In several hundred thousand years, some of the forming stars will accrete enough material to trigger nuclear fusion at their cores and then blaze into stardom.

Spitzer is designed to see shorter infrared wavelengths than Herschel. By combining their observations, astronomers get a more complete picture of star formation. The colors in this image relate to the different wavelengths of light, and to the temperature of material, mostly dust, in this region of Orion. Data from Spitzer show warmer objects in blue, with progressively cooler dust appearing green and red in the Herschel datasets. The more evolved, hotter embryonic stars thus appear in blue.

Infrared data at wavelengths of 8.0 and 24 microns from Spitzer are rendered in blue. Herschel data with wavelengths of 70 and 160 microns are represented in green and red, respectively. This image was released on Feb. 29, 2012.

Image Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/IRAM
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

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Astronomía: Estrellas embrionarias titilan en el corazón de Orión

Hola amigos: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., Gracias a los telescopios espaciales Herschel de la ESA y Spitzer de la NASA, los astrónomos han descubierto que el brillo de las estrellas en formación en el interior de la conocida nebulosa de Orión está cambiando de forma sorprendentemente rápida. This new view of the Orion Nebula shows embryonic stars within extensive gas and dust clouds. Combining far-infrared observations from the Herschel Space Observatory and mid-infrared observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the image shows newly forming stars surrounded by remnant gas and dust in the form of discs and larger envelopes.
Data from the PACS instrument on Herschel at wavelengths of 70 and 160 microns (a micron is a millionth of a metre) are shown as green and red, respectively, and reveal emission from the disks and envelopes of the very youngest protostars. Two Spitzer instruments, IRAC and MIPS, were used to obtain images of the same region at 8 and 24 microns, which are combined here as blue. These wavelengths show emission from the hotter regions of discs around somewhat older stars.
The region shown covers roughly 25x25 arcminutes on the sky or 3x3 parsecs at the distance to Orion.

Credits: ESA/PACS/NASA/JPL-Caltech/IRAM

Gracias a los telescopios espaciales Herschel de la ESA y Spitzer de la NASA, los astrónomos han descubierto que el brillo de las estrellas en formación en el interior de la conocida nebulosa de Orión está cambiando de forma sorprendentemente rápida. Al superponer los datos recogidos por el instrumento para el infrarrojo lejano de Herschel con los de dos instrumentos de Spitzer, que operan a longitudes de onda más cortas, se obtuvo esta imagen que muestra con detalle las estrellas en formación en el corazón de uno de los objetos más famosos del cielo nocturno.
La nebulosa de Orión se encuentra a 1350 años luz de la Tierra, y se puede distinguir claramente en el cielo invernal visible desde Europa.
También conocida como la ‘espada’ de Orión, esta nebulosa se encuentra debajo de las tres estrellas que forman el ‘cinturón’ de Orión ‘El Cazador’, una de las constelaciones más fáciles de reconocer.
Es una de las pocas nebulosas observables a simple vista, lo que la convierte en un objetivo popular entre los astrónomos aficionados.
Esta nebulosa alberga el cúmulo de formación de estrellas más cercano a nuestro planeta, en el que las nubes de polvo y gas brillan al ser calentadas por la intensa luz ultravioleta emitida por las estrellas más jóvenes.
Dentro de estas nubes de polvo – impenetrables para la luz visible – se encuentra un gran número de estrellas embrionarias, todavía desarrollándose en la fase más temprana de su proceso de evolución.
Esta combinación de imágenes tomadas en las bandas del infrarrojo medio y del infrarrojo lejano nos permite atravesar esta densa nube de polvo para desvelar los secretos de las estrellas en formación.
El proceso de formación de las estrellas comienza cuando una densa nube de polvo y gas empieza a aglutinarse y a colapsar bajo la acción de su propia gravedad, formando un núcleo central o protoestrella rodeado por un disco de acreción.
A lo largo de cientos de miles de años, el material del disco va cayendo en espiral atraído por la protoestrella, hasta que ésta alcanza la densidad suficiente para arrancar el proceso de fusión y se convierte en una estrella madura.
Una parte del polvo y del gas contenido en el disco de acreción podría llegar a formar un sistema planetario – tal y como pasó en nuestro Sistema Solar.
Un equipo de astrónomos liderado por Nicolás Billot, del Instituto de Radioastronomía Milimétrica (IRAM) en Granada, España, utilizó el telescopio Herschel para tomar una imagen semanal de la nebulosa de Orión durante seis semanas, a finales del invierno y durante gran parte de la primavera del año pasado.
El instrumento PACS de Herschel descubrió partículas de polvo frío en los discos de acreción de las protoestrellas más jóvenes, al observarlas en la banda del infrarrojo lejano.
Estos resultados se combinaron con imágenes de archivo de Spitzer, tomadas en la banda del infrarrojo medio, en las que se pueden distinguir formaciones más antiguas y a mayor temperatura.
Los astrónomos quedaron sorprendidos al descubrir que el brillo de los objetos más jóvenes variaba hasta un 20% en cuestión de semanas, ya que el proceso de acreción puede durar años o incluso siglos. Ahora están tratando de encontrar una explicación para este inusual fenómeno.
Una posible hipótesis apunta a la presencia de filamentos de gas que estén canalizando material desde el disco exterior hasta la región más próxima a la estrella, calentando de forma temporal el interior del disco, lo que le haría brillar.
Otra posibilidad sugiere que se está acumulando material frío en el borde interno del disco de acreción, que proyectaría sombras sobre la región exterior del disco, oscureciéndolo temporalmente.
En cualquier caso, queda claro que la gestación de una nueva estrella dista mucho de ser un proceso uniforme y regular.
“Una vez más, los resultados de Herschel nos sorprenden y nos ayudan a comprender mejor lo que está ocurriendo durante las primeras fases del proceso de formación de las estrellas y de los planetas”, comenta Göran Pilbratt, Científico del Proyecto Herschel para la ESA.
Gracias a su sensibilidad en el infrarrojo lejano y a su resolución sin precedentes, Herschel permite a los astrónomos contemplar y estudiar los procesos físicos que tienen lugar durante el proceso de formación de las estrellas. ESA
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
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ASTRONOMY: Chaos at the Heart of Orion

Hi My Friends: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., Chaos at the Heart of the Orion constellation. Chaos at the Heart of Orion:
NASA's Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes teamed up to expose the chaos that baby stars are creating 1,500 light years away in a cosmic cloud called the Orion nebula. This striking composite indicates that four monstrously massive stars, collectively called the "Trapezium," at the center of the cloud may be the main culprits in the Orion constellation, a familiar sight in the fall and winter night sky in the northern hemisphere. Their community can be identified as the yellow smudge near the center of the image.

Swirls of green in Hubble's ultraviolet and visible-light view reveal hydrogen and sulfur gas that have been heated and ionized by intense ultraviolet radiation from the Trapezium's stars. Meanwhile, Spitzer's infrared view exposes carbon-rich molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the cloud. These organic molecules have been illuminated by the Trapezium's stars, and are shown in the composite as wisps of red and orange. On Earth, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are found on burnt toast and in automobile exhaust.

Stellar winds from clusters of newborn stars scattered throughout the cloud etched all of the well-defined ridges and cavities in Orion. The large cavity near the right of the image was most likely carved by winds from the Trapezium's stars. Located 1,500 light-years away from Earth, the Orion nebula is the brightest spot in the sword of the Orion, or the "Hunter" constellation. The cosmic cloud is also our closest massive star-formation factory, and astronomers believe it contains more than 1,000 young stars. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

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