stars of orion essays

stars of orion essays 01. Why do the stars in Orion look so different from each other? Looking at Orion is more than just looking at an area that is easy to recognize in the night sky. Orion is seething with activity and illustrates a clear and concise picture, of how stars are formed. It gives us the ability to compare different types of stars and most importantly, it's right next door to Earth, astronomically speaking. The interest in Orion is currently at frenzy level, astronomers have always been interested in Orion because it is only 450 parsecs (1500 light years) from Earth. As viewed from ground based telescopes, Orion has twice the angular diameter of the full moon, around 1 degree. Known as the saucepan, Orion has a most distinctive and easy to find star pattern, located in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun. Orion is named after the Hunter of Greek mythology. If what we can see of Orion is considered exciting, that pales under the stark reality of what lies in the same region, that we can not see. To understand more about the differences in Orion, you must establish that there are differences between two sets of stars, the visible and the non-visible. The image above shows the distinctive blue/white colour of Rigel and the cool red supergiant Betelgeuse. At the center of the nebula is a cluster of four stars called the Trapezium. The brightest star in the Trapezium, known as Theta 1 Orionis C, is a very hot 39,000 Kelvin, and is the source of most of the UV radiation, which causes the nebula to glow. Below left, shows the four stars glowing brilliantly at the bottom left edge of the photo. The infrared vision of the Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) is illustrating an Orion that few people outside of astronomers ever see. Thanks to Hubble more people are being introduced to astronomy with such magnificent images as these on the left. Stars in Orion looking different now t...