NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope reveal the Orion nebula in an entirely new way. Orion nebula is one of the closest star formation regions to Earth, lying about 1,500 light years away. This makes Orion an excellent location for studying how stars are born and develop.

Chandra stared at the central region of Orion, making X-ray observations that lasted almost 13 days, allowing astronomers to view the activity of Sun-like stars between 1 and 10 million years old. The bright blue and orange point-like sources in this image are burgeoning stars.

The fledgling stars flared in X-ray intensity much more than our sun does today. This evidence suggests our sun made many violent and energetic outbursts when it was much younger. The wispy pink and purple filaments are clouds of gas and dust as seen by Hubble in optical light. This gas and dust will eventually condense into disks of material from which future stars will be born.

--Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and SPACE.com Staff

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State/E.Feigelson & K.Getman et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/M. Robberto et al.