December 29, 2015
Your life began on a planet that never stops moving under a sky that never stops changing.
Dust of the Orion Nebula
Birthday · December 29, 2015
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APOD published December 29, 2015. Credit: Raul Villaverde Fraile. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
What surrounds a hotbed of star formation? In the case of the Orion Nebula -- dust. The entire Orion field, located about 1600 light years away, is inundated with intricate and picturesque filaments of dust. Opaque to visible light, dust is created in the outer atmosphere of massive cool stars and expelled by a strong outer wind of particles. The Trapezium and other forming star clusters are embedded in the nebula. The intricate filaments of dust surrounding M42 and M43 appear brown in the featured image, while central glowing gas is highlighted in red. Over the next few million years much of Orion's dust will be slowly destroyed by the very stars now being formed, or dispersed into the Galaxy. Explore the Universe: Random APOD Generator
Image credit: Raul Villaverde Fraile