![]() The star is so young that it is still surrounded by a cloud of material left over from its formation, here seen as the NGC 1999 reflection nebula. Its mass is estimated to be 3.5 times that of the Sun. ![]() This star is cataloged as V380 Orionis, and its white color is due to its high surface temperature of about 10,000 degrees Celsius (nearly twice that of our own Sun). The NGC 1999 nebula is illuminated by a bright, recently formed star, visible in the Hubble photo just to the left of center. Herbig-Haro objects are now known to be jets of gas ejected from very young stars. The nebula is famous in astronomical history because the first Herbig-Haro object was discovered immediately adjacent to it (it lies just outside the new Hubble image). NGC 1999 lies close to the famous Orion Nebula, about 1,500 light-years from Earth, in a region of our Milky Way galaxy where new stars are being formed actively. Like fog around a street lamp, a reflection nebula shines only because the light from an embedded source illuminates its dust the nebula does not emit any visible light of its own. ![]() NGC 1999 is an example of a reflection nebula. The Heritage astronomers, in collaboration with scientists in Texas and Ireland, used Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) to obtain the color image. Just weeks after NASA astronauts repaired the Hubble Space Telescope in December 1999, the Hubble Heritage Project snapped this picture of NGC 1999, a nebula in the constellation Orion.
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