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Aug 5, 2018
Trapezium: At the Heart of Orion
Image Credit & Copyright: Astronomy Picture of the Day -- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Courtesy of http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Trapezium: At the Heart of Orion
Image Credit & Copyright: Astronomy Picture of the Day -- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Courtesy of http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Near the center of this sharp cosmic portrait, at
the heart of the Orion Nebula,
are four hot, massive stars
known as
the Trapezium.
Gathered within a region about 1.5 light-years in radius,
they dominate the core of the dense Orion Nebula Star Cluster.
Ultraviolet ionizing radiation from the
Trapezium stars,
mostly from the brightest star
Theta-1
Orionis C
powers the complex star forming region's entire visible glow.
About three million years old, the Orion Nebula Cluster was
even more compact in its younger years and a
recent dynamical study indicates that
runaway stellar collisions
at an earlier age may have formed a black hole
with more than 100 times the mass of
the Sun.
The presence of a
black hole within the cluster
could explain the observed high velocities of the
Trapezium stars.
The Orion Nebula's distance of some 1,500
light-years would make it the
closest known black hole to planet Earth.
