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Orion Bar, John Bozeman

Orion Bar

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Orion Bar, John Bozeman

Orion Bar

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Description

Newborn stars still wrapped in cocoons of dust and gas are revealed in a new image of the famous Orion Nebula captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. 

The image, taken on Sunday (Sept. 11) with the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRCam instrument reveals unprecedented details of the Orion Nebula, a known star-forming region that is visible even to the naked eye. Fine structures in the dense dust and gas clouds that form the nebula come to the fore in the image with much greater clarity than in a previous image captured by Webb's predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. 

The nebula, which can be found in the night sky in the constellation Orion just south of the archer's belt, features a wall of dense gas and dust known as the Orion Bar. Inside this bar, energetic photons from stars in the Trapezium cluster (in the top right corner of the image) mix with a molecular cloud, triggering complex ionizing reactions. At the center of the bar, the star Theta2 Orionis A (or θ2 Ori) shines brightly with the characteristic diffraction spikes that are a side-effect of the design of the James Webb Space Telescope's mirror.

Color Mapped:

Red - F355M
Green - F355M
Blue - F182M

Processed with FITS Liberator, PixInsight and Photoshop 2022

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Orion Bar, John Bozeman