Orion Nebula (M42) in infrared — VISTA's near-infrared eye sees through the dust, revealing thousands of young and still-forming stars normally hidden inside the nebula's glowing cocoon.

Orion Nebula (M42) in visible — The Hubble Orion Treasury mosaic — the sharpest visible-light view of the nebula ever made: curtains of ionised gas lit by the four hot Trapezium stars, threaded with dark dust and silhouetted protoplanetary disks.

Orion Nebula (M42) in xray — The Chandra Orion Ultradeep Project caught the X-ray flares of more than a thousand young stars — their hot, magnetically active coronae blazing where visible light shows only gas.

Orion Nebula (M42) in multi — Spitzer's infrared dust (orange and red) layered over Hubble's ionised gas (green) — the cooler outer clouds and the blazing Trapezium cavern seen together in one frame.

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Orion Nebula

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Cassiopeia A

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Centaurus A

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Crab Nebula

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Orion Nebula (M42)

The nearest stellar nursery — a glowing cavern of gas and dust where the hot young Trapezium stars are setting the whole nebula ablaze.

The Orion Nebula, M42, is the nearest massive star-forming region to Earth, just 1,344 light-years away in the sword of Orion — close enough to glimpse with the naked eye and study star by star. It is a vast cavern being hollowed out of a giant molecular cloud by the fierce ultraviolet light and winds of the Trapezium, a knot of hot young stars at its heart. Inside, thousands of stars are being born, many still cocooned in the dusty protoplanetary disks from which new solar systems will form. Each wavelength tells a different chapter: Hubble's visible light shows the glowing ionised gas and silhouetted disks, ESO's VISTA sees through the dust in infrared to the swarm of embedded young stars, and Chandra's X-rays catch the flaring coronae of more than a thousand of those stars — invisible at any other wavelength.