Space and Physics
NASA has released a rather wondrous visualization of what it would be like to fly through the Orion Nebula.
Using data from the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, scientists stitched together a 3D fly-through of the famous nebula, which is in the process of forming stars.
We are treated to glorious glowing clouds being heated by radiation, huge envelopes of gas around disks of new planetary systems, and new stars being born. The Orion nebula is about 1,344 light-years away, and just 2 million years old – a blink of an eye in cosmic terms.
Of course, we didn’t actually send those telescopes through the nebula to make the video. Instead, using imagery from the telescopes and “Hollywood techniques", according to NASA, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and the Caltech/Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) in California were able to produce the three-minute video.
You can check it out below, and as it's got a rather nice musical backdrop, so you might want to turn your sound on too.
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![An artist’s concept looks down into the core of the galaxy M87, which is just left of centre and appears as a large blue dot. A bright blue-white, narrow and linear jet of plasma transects the illustration from centre left to upper right. It begins at the source of the jet, the galaxy’s black hole, which is surrounded by a blue spiral of material. At lower right is a red giant star that is far from the black hole and close to the viewer. A bridge of glowing gas links the star to a smaller white dwarf star companion immediately to its left. Engorged with infalling hydrogen from the red giant star, the smaller star exploded in a blue-white flash, which looks like numerous diffraction spikes emitted in all directions. Thousands of stars are in the background.]](https://assets.iflscience.com/assets/articleNo/76155/aImg/79193/jet-m.jpg)
