The deepest view into the Orion Nebula has been captured by astronomers, who are engaged in working on the Very Large Telescope in Chile.
This star-formation is positioned 1,350 light-years from the sun and another 24 light-years across. It can be seen easily, and it projects the image of a rather "fuzzy patch in Orion's sword." It is lit up by hot stars within it as well as bright plasma clouds "stripped of electrons from the ensuing ultraviolet radiation."
With the help of the HAWK-I infrared instrument on the VLT to shoot the image, scientists were able to take more than mere pictures. They discovered more "low-mass" and planet-sized objects than they expected. Researchers also found that the brown dwarfs were ten times more in number than before, compared to earlier surveys. Brown dwarfs blur the line between gas giants and stars.
"Understanding how many low-mass objects are found in the Orion nebula is very important to constrain current theories of star formation," said Amelia Bayo, a co-author on the new paper, and an astronomer at The University of Valparaíso in Chile and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany."We now realize that the way these very low-mass objects form depends on their environment."
Interstellar space areas, such as the Orion Nebula, tend to form small as well as huge stars, leading to a number of planet-sized objects. Those far-off objects can be seen in space by the observatory's European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), which will start operations in Chile in 2024, according to ESO officials.
"Our result feels to me like a glimpse into a new era of a planet and star formation science," Holger Drass, lead author on the work and astronomer at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile said. "The huge number of free-floating planets at our current observational limit is giving me hope that we will discover a wealth of smaller, Earth-sized planets with the E-ELT."
The findings were recorded in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
