Astronomy Picture of the Day - Trapezium: At the Heart of Orion

NASA ^ | 5 Dec, 2024 | Image Credit & Copyright: Fred Zimmer, Telescope Live

[MtnClimber]

Explanation: Near the center of this sharp cosmic portrait, at the heart of the Orion Nebula, are four hot, massive stars known as the Trapezium. Gathered within a region about 1.5 light-years in radius, they dominate the core of the dense Orion Nebula Star Cluster. Ultraviolet ionizing radiation from the Trapezium stars, mostly from the brightest star Theta-1 Orionis C powers the complex star forming region's entire visible glow. About three million years old, the Orion Nebula Cluster was even more compact in its younger years and a dynamical study indicates that runaway stellar collisions at an earlier age may have formed a black hole with more than 100 times the mass of the Sun. The presence of a black hole within the cluster could explain the observed high velocities of the Trapezium stars. The Orion Nebula's distance of some 1,500 light-years would make it one of the closest known black holes to planet Earth.

[MtnClimber]

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[MtnClimber]

[MtnClimber]

Pinging the APOD list.

🪐 🌟 🌌 🍔

[Red Badger]

[No name given]

Wow.

[TangoLimaSierra]

I would have named it “The Borg”.

[usurper]

Look at all that solid gold cheddar.

[telescope115]

The Trapezium is fairly easy to see in a small telescope, where it gets interesting to me is how many stars can one see in the cluster ? It’s really a small but bright star cluster. The brightest four stars make up the trapezoid shape, but it has smaller fainter companions which are a part of of it. The four brightest stars can be seen, under excellent seeing conditions, in a 2.4 inch (60mm) refractor. The fainter stars need a clear, calm, dark sky, and a bigger telescope to be detected.