- It is a stellar nursery located 1,350 light years from Earth.

View of HH204, a Herbig-Haro object in the Orion Nebula. / IAC

The Orion Nebula, as you have never seen it before

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured the sharpest images ever taken of the inner region of the Orion Nebula, a stellar nursery located 1,350 light-years from Earth. The new images released on September 12 were the target of an international collaboration, which includes researchers from Western University.

"We are overwhelmed by the impressive images of the Orion Nebula. We started this project in 2017, so we have been waiting more than five years to obtain this data," Els Peeters, an astrophysicist at this university, said in a statement.

These images were obtained as part of the Photodissociation Regions for All (PDRs4All ID 1288) advance publication science program at Webb. Co-led by Peeters, French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) scientist Olivier Berné, and Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS) Associate Professor Emilie Habart, PDRs4All is an international collaboration involving a team of over one hundred scientists in 18 countries.

"These new observations allow us to better understand how massive stars transform the cloud of gas and dust in which they are born," said Peeters, professor of astronomy at Western.

"Massive young stars emit large amounts of ultraviolet radiation directly into the native cloud that still surrounds them, and this changes the physical shape of the cloud as well as its chemical composition. It is not yet known precisely how this works and how it affects the formation of stars and planets. The new images reveal numerous spectacular structures within the nebula, on scales comparable to the size of the Solar System.

"We clearly see several dense filaments. These filamentary structures can promote a new generation of stars in the deeper regions of the cloud of dust and gas. Star systems that are already in formation also appear," said Berné. "Inside its cocoon, young stars with a disk of dust and gas in which planets are forming can be seen in the nebula. Small cavities excavated by new stars being ejected are also clearly visible."

The hearts of stellar nurseries like the Orion Nebula are obscured by large amounts of stardust, making it impossible to study what's going on inside them in visible light with telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope. Webb detects infrared light from the cosmos, allowing observers to see through these layers of dust while revealing the action going on inside the Nebula.

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