in the Trapezium cluster, scientists have found dozens of planet-like objects roughly the mass of Jupiter untethered to any star, drifting through the galaxy in gravitationally-bound pairs.
Astronomers using ALMA, have found the fingerprints of sodium chloride – table salt – in a ring of dusty debris around a massive young star 1,500 light years away that formed in the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex.
Roughly 1300 light-years from Earth lies the Orion Nebula. A team at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in US created this zoom into the stellar nursery and a 3D visualization.
This ethereal-looking image of the Orion Nebula was captured using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory, Chile. This nebula is much more than just a pretty face, offering astronomers a close-up view of a massive star-forming region to help advance our understanding of stellar birth and evolution. The data used for this image were selected by Igor Chekalin (Russia), who participated in ESO’s Hidden Treasures 2010 astrophotography competition. Igor’s composition of the Orion Nebula was the seventh highest ranked entry in the competition, although another of Igor’s images was the eventual overall winner.
