Call me an adult with an overactive imagination, a dreamer or a delusional geek but sometimes I just can’t help but wonder … What would my backyard look like if Earth was a little closer to the Orion Nebula?
Ah, now that’s worth pulling out the deck chairs and a pondering over a tequila sunrise.
Hubble’s Sharpest View of the Orion Nebula:
The Orion Nebula is a cavern of tumultuous gas and dust where thousands of stars are forming. The energy released by the young stars transforms their place of birth, whipping their surroundings into fantastic forms.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
NGC 3603 is visible in the telescope as a small rather insignificant nebulosity with a yellowish tinge due to the effects of interstellar absorption. In the mid-1960s optical studies coincided with radio astronomical observations which showed it to be an extremely strong thermal radio source. Later observations in other galaxies introduced the concept of ’starburst’ regions, in some cases whole galaxies, of extremely rapid star formation and NGC 3603 is now considered to be such a region. In 1987 a supernova (known as SN 1987A) occurred in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This was the first supernova to be close enough for detailed observation with satellite based telescopes. One result was the discovery that prior to the main explosion it had thrown off a relatively small amount of material in a very distinctive pattern, a bit like an hourglass perpendicular to a detached glowing ring. One star in NGC 3603 (Sher 25, the number comes from the 1960s optical observations) was found to have thrown off matter in a pattern similar to that found for the supernova 1987A. This coincidence has aroused intense interest.
NGC 3603 image - Hubble Space Telescope, NASA
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