Explanation:
This esthetic close-up
of cosmic clouds and stellar winds
features LL Orionis, interacting with the
Orion Nebula flow.
Adrift in Orion's
stellar nursery
and still in its formative years,
variable star LL Orionis produces a wind more
energetic than
the wind from our own
middle-aged Sun.
As the fast stellar wind runs into slow moving gas a shock front is
formed, analogous to the
bow
wave of a boat moving through water or
a plane traveling at supersonic speed.
The small, arcing, graceful structure just above and left of
center is LL Ori's cosmic
bow shock, measuring about half a light-year across.
The slower gas is flowing away from the Orion Nebula's hot central star
cluster, the Trapezium, located off the upper left corner
of the picture.
In three
dimensions, LL Ori's wrap-around shock front is shaped like a
bowl that appears brightest when viewed along the "bottom" edge.
The beautiful picture is part of a
large mosaic view of
the complex
stellar nursery in Orion, filled with a myriad of
fluidshapes associated with
star formation.
News: New Horizons spacecraft
launched to Pluto.
