Intense Diffuse Emission from the Orion Nebula

Richard Conn Henry, Jayant Murthy, and David J. Sahnow

Text of Press Release

Four pictures to accompany the press release are given below, together with expanatory captions. All of the pictures are in pdf format, which can be viewed with Acrobat Reader. pdf preserves all details of a figure, which is why we use it!

Figure Caption: Drawing of the constellation Orion. (The drawing of Orion is copyright Voyager Software (925-838-0695), the folks who make the wonderful Voyager III planetarium program.) We observed near the Orion Nebula

Figure Caption: The red/yellow background is interstellar gas and dust from which the stars are born. The blue circles are hot young stars recently born from the gas. I've made ONE star (lower right) black instead of blue, to show you which particular star we observed near.

Figure Caption: This star atlas chart shows Orion where we observed. The green dashed circle is the region of the Orion nebula. The black star is the one we observed near. The two TINY red dots show exactly where we observed with FUSE.

Figure Caption: The blue spectrum is our observation! The red spectrum, for comparison, is that of the hot star near which we observed. Notice the huge difference at about 1025 A between the two spectra, showing that our observation is NOT of that particular star's light scattered from dust, but ... from something else!