The customized code allows Summers to run this and other visualizations on desktop workstations, rather than on a supercomputing cluster. To give the nebula its ethereal feel, Summers wrote a special rendering code for efficiently combining the tens of millions of semi-transparent elements of the gas. They first created a visible-light surface, and then an underlying structure of the infrared features. Starting with the two-dimensional Hubble and Spitzer images, Summers and Hurt worked with experts to analyze the structure inside the nebula. The three-dimensional interpretation is guided by scientific knowledge and scientific intuition. The effort combines a direct connection to the science and scientists of NASA's Astrophysics missions with attention to audience needs to enable youth, families, and lifelong learners to explore fundamental questions in science, experience how science is done, and discover the universe for themselves. The visualization is one of a new generation of products and experiences being developed by the NASA's Universe of Learning program. The new visualization helps people experience how the two telescopes provide a more complex and complete picture of the nebula. Spitzer's infrared vision pierces through obscuring dust to see stars embedded deep into the nebula, as well as fainter and less massive stars, which are brighter in the infrared than in visible light. Spitzer is sensitive to cooler objects with temperatures of just hundreds of degrees. Hubble sees objects that glow in visible light, which are typically in the thousands of degrees.
#Orion nebula 3 movie#
By toggling between the Hubble and Spitzer's views, the movie shows strikingly different details of the Orion Nebula. The scientific visualization video takes the viewer on a breathtaking flight through the nebula, following the contours of the gas and dust. Colorful Hubble and Spitzer images were then overlaid on the terrain.
#Orion nebula 3 torrent#
A torrent of ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from the massive, central stars of the Trapezium star cluster have carved out a cavernous bowl-like cavity in the wall of a giant cloud of cold molecular hydrogen laced with dust.Īstronomers and visualizers worked together to make a three-dimensional model of the depths of this cavernous region, like plotting mountains and valleys on the ocean floor. The three-dimensional video provides a look at the fantastic topography of the nebula.
It offers a glimpse of what might have happened when the Sun was born 4.6 billion years ago. At only 2 million years old, the nebula is an ideal laboratory for studying young stars and stars that are still forming. It appears as the middle "star" in the sword of the constellation Orion, the Hunter, and is located about 1,350 light-years away. One of the sky's brightest nebulas, the Orion Nebula is visible to the naked eye. This movie provides a uniquely immersive chance to see how new features appear as we shift to wavelengths of light normally invisible to our eyes," said Robert Hurt, lead visualization scientist at IPAC. "Looking at the universe in infrared light gives striking context for the more familiar visible-light views. "By adding depth and structure to the amazing images, this fly-through helps elucidate the universe for the public, both educating and inspiring," added Summers. "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," explained the Space Telescope Science Institute's visualization scientist Frank Summers, who led the team that developed the movie. It is available to planetariums and other centers of informal learning worldwide to help audiences explore fundamental questions in science such as, "How did we get here?" The three-minute movie, which shows the Orion Nebula in both visible and infrared light, was released to the public today. The fly-through enables people to experience and learn about the universe in an exciting new way. Using actual scientific imagery and other data, combined with Hollywood techniques, a team at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California, has created the best and most detailed multi-wavelength visualization yet of this photogenic nebula. Viewers experience this nearby stellar nursery "close up and personally" as the new digital visualization ferries them among newborn stars, glowing clouds heated by intense radiation, and tadpole-shaped gaseous envelopes surrounding protoplanetary disks. Astronomers and visualization specialists from NASA's Universe of Learning program have combined visible and infrared vision of the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to create an unprecedented, three-dimensional, fly-through view of the picturesque Orion Nebula, a nearby star-forming region.
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