Orion constellation overshadows busy nursery of stars
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LONDON - The constellation Orion hides a busy stellar nursery, crowded with young stars blasting jets of gas in all directions, astronomers reported Sunday.
A dusty nebula that looks like a fuzzy patch around Orion's "sword" hides a large region bursting with immature stars, they said.
"Regions like this are usually referred to as stellar nurseries, but we have shown that this one is not being well run: It is chaotic and seriously overcrowded," Chris Davis of the Joint Astronomy Center in Hawaii said in a statement.
These young stars are spewing jets of hydrogen molecules across trillions of miles of interstellar space, the astronomers said in material prepared for this week's National Astronomy Meeting of the UK in Hertfordshire.
The international research team used the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope in Hawaii, the international research institute for radio astronomy, or IRAM, Millimeter-wave Telescope in Spain, and the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope above the Earth.
