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Keck and JWST team up to watch as massive stars blast away gas in the Orion Nebula
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Keck and JWST team up to watch as massive stars blast away gas in the Orion Nebula

SYFY·Phil Plait·about 1 month ago
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One of the most truly spectacular objects in the entire sky is the celebrated Orion Nebula, a star-birth factory 1,300 light-years from Earth. It's so bright that it can be seen with the naked eye; it looks like a star, the middle of three that form Orion's "dagger" that hangs down from his Belt. With a telescope it reveals itself to be a brilliant and colorful display of hot gas a couple of dozen light-years across. But our view of it is changing, because it’s eating itself up from the inside out. The question is, will this process destroy the gas and starve stars of building material, or will it help trigger the formation of new stars? To find out more, a team of astronomers used both the ground-based 10-meter Keck telescope with a near-infrared camera and the space observatory JWST to observe the Orion Nebula, the closest site of massive star formation to the Sun.…

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