The dust and gas in this portion of the Orion’s cloud glows green with the light of nearby stars. Here young stars gobble up surrounding material, some of which is cast into space in jets. These jets can be seen near the top of the image as small pink arcs, knots, and filaments. This view of the nebula combines images taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope and the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (Image: UKIRT/JAC/Spitzer Telescope) This jet (red) is speeding from a busy star-forming region in Orion’s cloud. The wisps and knots visible here are all associated with young stars, which appear orange in this image. The United Kingdom Infrared Telescope in Hawaii snapped this picture (Image: UKIRT/JAC)

Dozens of high-speed jets of gas in a crowded stellar nursery have been traced to the stars from which they emanate.


The well-known Orion nebula, which sits some 1300 light years from Earth, is just a small portion of a much larger stellar nursery (see map). This entire “molecular cloud” spans a region on the sky as wide as 20 full moons but is largely obscured by gas and dust.

Now observations at a range of wavelengths have cut through this interference to reveal some of the violent activity in the cloud. This activity includes jets of gas that stretch for millions of kilometres away from young stars. Magnetic fields slingshot material around the stars outwards, creating the dramatic structures.

An international team of astronomers compared 10-year-old infrared observations of the cloud with new data taken with the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope in Hawaii, the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope, and a radio telescope called IRAM.

They measured the speeds and directions of stellar jets in the cloud, tracing most of the 110 or so jets they found to specific young stars.

“Measuring the speeds and directions of the jets is essential to pinpoint the driving sources, especially in such crowded regions,” says team member Dirk Froebrich of the University of Kent.

The images were released on Monday at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in the UK.