ESO Captures Fiery Ribbon Streaking Across Space in Orion Constellation

A fiery ribbon streaks across space in the form of cosmic clouds within the constellation of Orion. Now, the ESO-operated Atacama Pathfinder Experiment has captured a stunning image of this spectacle, revealing the faint light coming from grains of cold interstellar dust at wavelengths that are too long for the human eye to see.

These cosmic clouds are made up of gas and interstellar dust. In fact, they represent the raw materials from which stars are made. Yet because of their composition, they can often block what lies within and behind them--at least at visible wavelengths. This makes it difficult to observe the process of stars being born.

That doesn't mean that scientists haven't found a way around that particular problem, though. In order to thwart the tiny dust grains that block their view, astronomers use instruments that possess the ability to see at other wavelengths of light. At submillimeter wavelengths, the dust grains actually shine due to their temperature of a few tens of degrees above absolute zero.

In this recent picture, you can see just a part of a larger complex called the Orion Molecular Cloud, which resides within the constellation of Orion. This melting pot of bright nebulae, hot young stars and cold dust clouds is hundreds of light-years across and located about 1,350 light-years from Earth.

If you look at the upper right of the image, you can see a large, bright cloud. This is the well-known Orion Nebula, also called Messier 42. It is readily visible to the naked eye as the slightly fuzzy middle "star" in the sword of the Orion constellation. The otherworldly and beautiful filaments and sheets that you can see in the image are formed through a variety of processes, including gravitational collapse and the effect of stellar winds. The winds themselves are streams of gas ejected from the atmosphere of stars, which are powerful enough to shape the surrounding clouds into the convoluted forms that you can see.

Currently, astronomers are using data from APEX along with images from ESA's Herschel Space Observatory to search the region of Orion for protostars, an early stage of star formation. While they continue to hunt, though, they're showing the public some fantastic images.

The research on protostars in this region is described in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal.