Image 7-6
Heart of Orion

NASA's Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes have teamed up to expose the chaos that baby stars are creating 1,500 light-years away in the Orion Nebula. This infrared and visible-light composite image indicates that four massive stars at the center of the cloud may be the main culprits in the familiar Orion constellation. These stars are known as the Trapezium. They appear as a yellow smudge near the center of the image. Swirls of green in Hubble's ultraviolet and visible-light view reveal hydrogen and sulfur gas that have ionized by intense ultraviolet radiation from the Trapezium's stars.