The Webb Telescope captures the most beautiful object in the night sky in a stunning new release

It’s one of the most incredible places in the night sky visible to the naked eye – and has now been imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The Orion Nebula — also known as M42 — is a stellar nursery, home to newborn stars. It’s the closest region in space to us and maybe, just maybe, where our own star, the Sun, formed about 4.5 billion years ago.

This brightest nebula of all is a diffuse cloud of gas and dust about 1,300 light-years away and is part of “Orion’s Sword” hanging from Orion’s Belt.

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The images released today show something wonderfully complex, yet so simple – space warmed by starlight.

The images here are composite images that use JWST’s NIRCam instrument filters to isolate different wavelengths of light reflected from ionized gas, hydrocarbons, molecular gas, dust and scattered starlight.

In the main image above, just out of frame, you can see the Orion Bar, a ridge of dense gas and dust lit by hot, young, massive stars from the nearby Trapezium Cluster.

A region of space zapped with ultraviolet (UV) radiation from massive young stars — or more simply, heated by starlight — is what astronomers call a photo-dissociation region (PDR).

PDRs are of great interest because they are the best place to find clues about how stars and planets form.

In the main image, commented above, it is possible to see four incredible cosmic sights:

• A baby star in its cocoon (upper right): disks of gas and dust around a young star, possibly planet-forming, called HST-10.
• Filaments (bottom right): Meandering filaments rich in hydrocarbon molecules and molecular hydrogen fill most of the image.
• Theta2 Orionis (θ² Orionis A) (center): a multiple star system whose light illuminates dust beyond.
• A baby star in a sphere (centre, left): gravitationally unstable clouds of gas and dust collapse into embryos that slowly increase in size before becoming glowing nuclear fusion reactors.

The images come from the Photo-Dissociation Regions For All Early Science Release (PDRs4All ERS) team, researchers using mankind’s most advanced telescopes to study these hot, ionized environments.

In addition to being compared above to previous images of the region taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, the Orion Bar was captured last week by the same PDRs4All team using the WM-Keck Observatory on the island of Hawaii.

Here’s Keck’s image, below, again compared to Hubble’s efforts:

“Observing PDRs is like looking into our past,” said Emilie Habart, associate professor at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale at the University of Paris-Saclay and lead author of a paper on the study. “These regions are important because they allow us to understand how young stars affect the cloud of gas and dust in which they are born, particularly in places where stars like the Sun form.”

The image above (right side) helped the team plan the JWST images you see here.

As a bonus, the PDRs4All ERS team also released this incredibly beautiful image of the northern region of the Orion Nebula, again showing its incredible filaments:

You can now see the Orion Nebula with your own eyes if you get up an hour before sunrise and face east. It is located in the constellation of Orion, “the hunter”.

Appearing as a fuzzy patch of diffuse light, it sits right next to Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka – the three stars of Orion’s belt, which lies between the reddish star Betelgeuse and the blue star Rigel. Although you can see it with the naked eye, the Orion Nebula is best seen through binoculars or a small telescope.

I wish you clear skies and big eyes.