What is Orion Nebula?

Orion Nebula is a diffusion nebula of about 30 light -years on average placed in the constellation Orion, under the Orion belt, 1,500 light -years from Earth. The diffusion nebula is thus named because it goes into space, it is partially transparent and lacks any well -defined boundary. It is one of the brightest and most famous nebulae in the night sky, which is also one of the best studied. He is also known as the M42 as a reference to his Messier number.

Orion Nebula is part of a larger body called Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, which is present in the entire constellation of Orion and contains other famous objects such as Barnard loop, horse loop, M43, M78 and Nebula. The Orion Nebula itself covers a 10 ° part of the sky, about a tenth of the size of the month. Being emissions and reflective nebula contains Stars that ionize the surrounding medium and molecular clouds that serve as "mirrors" reflecting light on the ground. Nebulae emissions are referred to as "hii regions", in relation to the abundant ionizedthe hydrogen gas containing. The HII area is also a place where we can find the birth of stars in objects called the side of the globule and subsequent protoplanetary discs created around the sun's suns. Some of the youngest stars in the galaxy were observed at the borders of Orion.

Although Orion Nebula is visible to the naked eye, none of the ancient astronomers did not notice it, his discovery in 1610 attributed Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the Jesuit astronomer. Although Galileo Galilei used one of the first telescopes to observe the constellation Orion in the same year, not acknowledged.

Orion Nebula is the subject of the first astrophuoto, acquired by Henry Draper in 1865.