3-D Journey Flying Through Orion Nebula - NASA Animation Via Space Telescopes

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The three-minute movie, which shows the Orion Nebula in both visible and infrared light, was released to the public today. 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?"

"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. "By adding depth and structure to the amazing images, this fly-through helps elucidate the universe for the public, both educating and inspiring."

"Looking at the universe in infrared light gives striking context for the more familiar visible-light views. 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.

One of the sky's brightest nebulas, the Orion Nebula, is visible to the naked eye. It appears as the middle "star" in the sword of the constellation Orion, the Hunter, and is located about 1,350 light-years away. At only 2 million years old, the nebula is an ideal laboratory for studying young stars and stars that are still forming. It offers a glimpse of what might have happened when the Sun was born 4.6 billion years ago.

The three-dimensional video provides a look at the fantastic topography of the nebula. A torrent of ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from the massive, central stars of the Trapezium star cluster has carved out a cavernous bowl-like cavity in the wall of a giant cloud of cold molecular hydrogen laced with dust.

Astronomers 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. Colorful Hubble and Spitzer images were then overlaid on the terrain.