Spitzer and Hubble Create Colorful Masterpiece

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Whitney Clavin (818) 354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

News Release: 2006-136 Nov. 7, 2006

Spitzer and Hubble Create Colorful Masterpiece

A new image from NASA's Spitzer and Hubble Space
Telescopes looks more like an abstract painting than
a cosmic snapshot. The masterpiece shows the Orion
nebula in an explosion of infrared, ultraviolet and
visible-light colors. It was "painted" by hundreds of
baby stars on a canvas of gas and dust, with intense
ultraviolet light and strong stellar winds as brushes.

To view the new false-color image, visit

http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2006-21/ssc2006-21a.shtml


At the heart of the artwork is a set of four
monstrously massive stars, collectively called the
Trapezium. These behemoths are approximately 100,000
times brighter than our sun. Their community can be
identified as the yellow smudge near the center of the
composite.

The swirls of green were revealed by Hubble's
ultraviolet and visible-light detectors. They are
hydrogen and sulfur gases heated by intense ultraviolet
radiation from the Trapezium's stars.

Wisps of red and orange detected by Spitzer indicate
infrared light from illuminated clouds containing
carbon-rich molecules called polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbons. On Earth, polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbons are found on burnt toast and in automobile
exhaust.

Additional stars in Orion are sprinkled throughout the
image in a rainbow of colors. Spitzer exposed infant
stars deeply embedded in a cocoon of dust and gas
(orange-yellow dots). Hubble found less embedded stars
(specks of green) and stars in the foreground (blue).
Stellar winds from clusters of newborn stars scattered
throughout the cloud etched all the well-defined ridges
and cavities.

Located nearly 1,500 light-years away from Earth, the
Orion nebula is the brightest spot in the sword of the
hunter constellation. The cosmic cloud is also our
closest massive star-formation factory, and astronomers
suspect that it contains about 1,000 young stars.

The Orion constellation can be seen in the fall and
winter night skies from northern latitudes. The
constellation's nebula is invisible to the unaided eye,
but can be resolved with binoculars or small telescopes.

This image is a false-color composite, in which light
detected at wavelengths of 0.43, 0.50, and 0.53 microns
is blue. Light with wavelengths of 0.6, 0.65, and 0.91
microns is green. Light of 3.6 microns is orange, and
8-micron light is red.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.,
manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's
Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science
operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center
at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena,
which manages JPL for NASA.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of
international cooperation between NASA and the European
Space Agency. The Space Telescope Science Institute in
Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. The
Institute is operated for NASA by the Association of
Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc.,
Washington.

For more information about Spitzer, visit
http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer or
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer . For more
information about Hubble, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/hubble or http://hubblesite.org .

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