Brown Dwarfs in Orion Nebula
Date: 10 January 2006
Satellite: Hubble Space Telescope
Depicts: Orion Nebula, M42, M43
Copyright: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team
The faint red stars in this close-up image are the myriad brown dwarfs that Hubble spied for the first time in the Orion Nebula in visible light. Sometimes called "failed stars," brown dwarfs are cool objects that are too small to be ordinary stars because they cannot sustain nuclear fusion in their cores the way our Sun does.
Last Update: 1 September 2019