ESO releases the deepest look ever into the Orion Nebula

A new image of the Orion Nebula captured by the European Space Organization has revealed a new-found wealth of faint brown dwarfs and singular planetary-mass objects, according to a new report in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Captured by the HAWK-I infrared instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), the new image can provide clues into the history of star formation inside the famous nebula, which can be seen from Earth with the naked eye.

Because the nebula is just over 1,300 light years from Earth, it makes an ideal case study from learning about the sequence and history of star formation, and to find out how many stars of various masses form.

Finding “Low Mass Objects” in the nebula

In the new study, researchers were particularly focused on identifying “low-mass objects” like brown dwarfs and planet-sized objects.

“Understanding how many low-mass objects are found in the Orion Nebula is very important to constrain current theories of star formation,” study author Amelia Bayo, an astrophysicist from the Universidad de Valparaíso, said in a news release. “We now realize that the way these very low-mass objects form depends on their environment.”

The study team said the new image showed an unanticipated abundance of very-low-mass objects, which in turn indicates the Orion Nebula may be developing far more low-mass objects than closer and less active star-formation zones.

The number of different masses in regions like the Orion Nebula can give clues to how stars form, the researchers said. Prior to this study the greatest amount of items discovered had masses of around one quarter that of our Sun. The wealth of new items in the Orion Nebula have masses far less than this.

These findings also indicate the amount of planet-sized items might be far bigger than earlier thought. Even though the technology to easily observe these object does not exist yet, ESO’s future European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), scheduled to begin operations in 2024, is intended to investigate this as one of its goals.

“Our result feels to me like a glimpse into a new era of planet and star formation science,” said Holger Drass, from Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany. “The huge number of free-floating planets at our current observational limit is giving me hope that we will discover a wealth of smaller Earth-sized planets with the E-ELT.”

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Image credit: ESO

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