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Dust, creation and destruction, the story of Orion

All this in an image that combines data from three telescopes on the Orion nebula, the name of the nebula comes from the mythical Greek hunter who was felled by the sting of a scorpion, a whole Greek tragedy the end of his heroic deeds.

But not only mythology has an exciting story, the Nebula that is located in the constellation of the hunter, the three stars that are known online as Orion’s belt is the region shown in this study.

The data shows what appear to be two caverns carved out by giant stars, which are not only bigger than our sun, but could also be a million times brighter. It is a highly radioactive region that modifies atoms, generates dust, and helps create new cavities that will do the same, as well as new celestial objects. After a series of processes, what remains of that dust is swept away by the winds of the stars or by supernovae, whichever comes first.

Infrared light from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope as well as the WISE telescope (now called NEOWISE) indicated that the dust emits heat, a temperature that we would classify as lukewarm, around those two cavernous regions on the edge, the heat is less, With temperatures in which said greenish dust reaches 260 degrees below zero, thanks to ESA’s Herschel Space Telescope, which captures wavelengths in the infrared and microwave ranges, we were also able to observe in detail how nebulae work.

 

 

 

The Herschel with its large mirror presented these views with high resolution, where not only these “caverns” in the nebula were indicated, but also more contours, nooks and crannies were observed that generally go unnoticed in other observations, obviously we expect an in-depth study with James Webb, which we are sure will reveal much more information.

The Orion Nebula represents a typical star formation environment that is only 1400 light years away, in our Milky Way, this distance is perfect for it to be used as a laboratory for astronomers to study the cycle, as well as those regions “hollow” with some orange filaments.

Now this orange dust condenses and forms new stars, stars that at this moment shape and modify the region, in turn these stars explode, become supernovae and generate Nebulae, the cycle repeats itself, dust, stars are created, stars die and generate dust, and so on, until the dust is completely dissipated.

It is curious that in reality we do not know more than one face of the nebulae, we really do not know what they are like since they have volume, they are asymmetrical, and they are not flat objects, so our knowledge of them is scarce, something that is expected to change little. little by little