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Orion sw clean proc 8bit 20230925
2. October 2023
- Classification
- Photograph
- Museum
- Wikimedia Commons
- Credit line
- https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2023/09/Orion_Nebula_in_NIRCam_short-wavelength_channel
- Rights
- CC BY-SA 3.0, as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Kids profiles and older: it shows nature, places, still life or a children's book. How works are placed
About this work
Orion Nebula in NIRCam short-wavelength channel
This image shows the full survey of the inner Orion Nebula and Trapezium Cluster made using the NIRCam instrument on the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. This is the short-wavelength colour composite, which reveals the nebula, its stars, and many other objects in unprecedented detail in the infrared.
This young star-forming region is just a million years old and contains thousands of new stars spanning a range of masses from 40 down to less than 0.1 times the mass of the Sun. The region also contains many brown dwarfs, objects below seven percent of the mass of the Sun which are too small to start nuclear fusion in their cores. And below that, starting at roughly 13 times the mass of Jupiter, lie the planetary-mass objects. These new Webb data have revealed hundreds of such objects, floating freely in the nebula, not orbiting stars, the very smallest of which have just 60% the mass of Jupiter or two times the mass of Saturn.
The Orion Nebula lies roughly 1300 light-years from Earth in the so-called 'sword' of the constellation of Orion the Hunter, and the image shows a region that is 4 by 2.75-light years in size, smaller…
