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NASA 3-D virtual tour of Orion Nebula shows what you may see in stellar nursery

Saturday, 13 January 2018 6:30 PM [ Last Update: Saturday, 13 January 2018 7:04 PM ]

A highly detailed image of the Orion Nebula captured by the NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope

Standing on our shores of the cosmic ocean, we are helplessly striving to grasp the immense splendor and the majestic grandeur of the seemingly boundless universe. Although most parts of our Milky Way Galaxy, let alone the whole cosmos, is massively far beyond the grasp of our chemical rockets, we can fly through those far regions through embarking on 3-D virtual tours.

By coalescing the visible and infrared capabilities of the NASA/ESA Hubble and NASA Spitzer space telescopes, astronomers and visualization experts from NASA’s Universe of Learning program managed to create an educational and soothing 3-D visualization of the Orion Nebula, which lies more than 1,300 light years away from the Earth.

Being a nearby stellar nursery, the magnificent nebula, which is technically called the M42, is one of the brightest nebulae, and is quite visible to the unaided eye in a clear night sky.

“Being able to fly through the nebula’s tapestry in three dimensions gives people a much better sense of what the universe is really like,” said visualization scientist Frank Summers, who led the team that crafted the video, in a NASA press release.

The fly-through movie was made using actual scientific data along with Hollywood techniques to depict the best and most sophisticated multi-wavelength visualization yet of the nebula, which is estimated to be 24 light years across. The cavernous Orion Nebula, which is full of baby stars, is also one of the most scrutinized and photographed objects in the night sky.

“By adding depth and structure to the amazing images, this fly-through helps elucidate the universe for the public, both educating and inspiring...It’s a really wonderful thing when they can build a mental model in their head to transform the two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional scene,” Summers added.

On Thursday, astronomers announced at the 231st American Astronomical Society meeting in Maryland that the Orion Nebula hosts a pair of rogue planets that instead of orbiting a common star are actually dancing around one another.

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