This video depicts the Orion complex in both 2D and 3D, showing what astronomers can learn by combining both types of data for a single region.
This image shows a 2D view of the Orion complex in different wavelengths of light. Blue corresponds to hot gas, yellow indicates dust, and purple serves as a tracer of recent supernova explosions. The purple arc indicates the rough boundaries of the region containing supernova material that relates to the other structures. The blue star shows the center of a large arc of hot gas, known as Barnard鈥檚 Loop (outlined in blue). A large ring of dust that appears in both 2D and 3D data is shown by the yellow circle. Three major clouds of star-forming gas 鈥� Orion A (green), Orion B (cyan), and Orion Lam (purple) 鈥� are indicated by the colored lines. Superimposed on the image is a cluster of stars that likely produced supernovae in the last 4 million years (shown in white). This cluster is coherently expanding outwards from a single point, which is shown by the orange star.
News — Cambridge, MA – Astronomers studying the structure of the Milky Way galaxy have released the highest-resolution 3D view of the Orion star-forming region. The image and were presented today at a hosted by the American Astronomical Society.
Led by researchers at the , the work connects 3D data on young stars and interstellar gas around the Orion complex of star-forming regions. Analysis of the 2D and 3D images, alongside theoretical modeling, shows that supernova explosions within the last 4 million years produced large cavities in the interstellar material associated with Orion.
One particular cavity the team discovered may help explain the origin of Barnard’s Loop, a famous and mysterious semi-circle in the night sky first observed in 1894.
To 3D and Beyond
The study, which is , relies on 3D positions and velocities for young stars and interstellar clouds obtained using , a space telescope run by the European Space Agency. The team combined the Gaia-derived 3D data with existing 2D observations of the Orion region to piece together its star-formation history.
“Our first large-scale 3D look at Orion tells us so much,” says , a graduate student at the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) who led the study. “Prior to this work, most studies of Orion were confined to two dimensions — up-down and left-right on the sky. By adding in the third dimension — distance — we can begin to map out all sorts of interesting structures, like huge cavities of gas and dust or clusters of stars with very interesting motions. Combining the information from the interstellar gas and stars leads us to believe cavities were produced by a number of supernovae over the last few million years.”
“Orion has had quite an exciting history,” he adds.
Catching the Culprit: Finding a Source for Barnard’s Loop
One of the cavities detected by the team appears to correspond with Barnard’s Loop, a famous, giant arc of hot gas in the Orion region that astronomers have studied for over a hundred years. The origin of the arc is debated, but the new study offers evidence that a certain cluster of stars, which produced one or more supernovae, played a very large role in the formation of Barnard’s Loop.
Most of the new star formation in the Orion complex appears to happen on the edges of the giant cavities — one of which is nearly 500 light years wide — that appear throughout the region, suggesting that the supernovae that formed the cavities are ultimately responsible for the formation of the next generation of stars.
Supernovae Everywhere
The new findings are consistent with the team’s previous work on the and the .
“It seems clear that we are going to see a ‘swiss cheese’ picture of the interstellar medium, with stars forming at the edge of the holes, as we map more and more of the galaxy,” says , Harvard professor, CfA astronomer and co-author on the study.
“We believe that shells and loops in Orion, the Per-Tau shell, and the Local Bubble are the first of many discoveries relating new star formation to old supernovae,” Foley says. “Supernovae sweep up gas and dust into dense clumps, leading to the perfect birthplaces for new stars. The Orion region, rich in both star formation and supernovae, is the latest example of that.”
The new Orion results support the theory that when massive stars end their lives as supernova explosions, they create conditions ripe for the formation of new stars. The team is hard at work analyzing other regions in the Milky Way galaxy in 3D, and using numerical simulations, to see just how common supernova-driven star formation really is.
“Thanks to the work of many incredible scientists, 3D data will transform our understanding of star formation in our galaxy,” Foley notes. “It may be much more explosive than we even imagine!”
Seeing, and Publishing, in 3D
The scholarly paper presenting the Orion work contains 3D interactive figures showcasing the findings, as do essentially all of this team’s recent publications. The team’s interactive figures, which have appeared over the past few years in Nature, the Astrophysical Journal, and Astrophysical Journal Letters, were produced using the “” visualization software created and funded by NASA in-part to explore incoming data from the James Webb Space Telescope.
The figures make use of a plug-in for glue, written by co-author Catherine Zucker of the Space Telescope Science Institute, to export any author’s figures to an interactive graphing environment. The plug-in allows authors to manipulate figures in an ordinary web browser and explore their data further.
Use of the open-source glue software, and web versions of it, are currently making their way from astronomy to other areas of science, thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation and the Moore Foundation, as well as collaborations with commercial partners.
Goodman, the founder of glue, hopes that, “soon all scientists will explore their ‘universes’ in 3D, and share findings in publications just as easily as astronomers can today.”
Additional co-authors on the upcoming paper are: John Forbes of the Flatiron Institute; Shmuel Bialy of the University of Maryland; Cameren Swiggum, Josefa Groβschedl, and João Alves of the University of Vienna; Michael Grudic of the Carnegie Observatories; John Bally of the University of Colorado; Juan Soler of the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology (Rome); and Reimar Leike and Torsten Ensslin of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.
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