James Webb Space Telescope Feed Post

Young star and proto-planetary disk in Orion

This cutout from the new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope short-wavelength infrared image of the Orion Nebula shows a young star and its protoplanetary disk being sculpted by the intense ultraviolet radiation and winds from the massive Trapezium stars that lie at the centre of the region. 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. The object, known by its catalogue name d072-135, was first discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope at visible wavelengths, but the new Webb images reveal much more detail. The dusty disk around the central star is seen as a dark shadow or silhouette against the bright background light of the Orion Nebula and appears as an ellipse because the disk is oriented nearly edge-on. The disk is approximately 200 astronomical units in diameter, so more than three times the size of our Solar System out to Neptune. Image description: A star and its circumstellar disk are seen the grey-blue background of the Orion Nebula. The star is white and is surrounded by the elliptical dark shadow of its disk, with bright red material streaming away from the disk on the bottom side and a mix of blues and greens on the top side. These glowing gases are shaped into a tail streaming away towards the upper right, with the reds, blues, and greens slowly fading and blending. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA / Science leads and image processing: M. McCaughrean, S. Pearson