The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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This image shows the full survey of the inner Orion Nebula and Trapezium Cluster made using the NIRCam instrument on the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. This is the short wavelength colour composite, which reveals the nebula, its stars, and many other objects in unprecedented detail in the infrared.
This young star-forming region is just a million years old and contains thousands of new stars spanning a range of masses from 40 down to less than 0.1 times the mass of the Sun. The region also contains many brown dwarfs, objects below 7% of the mass of the Sun which are too small to start nuclear fusion in their cores. And below that, starting at roughly 13 times the mass of Jupiter, lie the planetary-mass objects. These new JWST data have revealed hundreds of such objects, floating freely in the nebula, not orbiting stars, the very smallest of which have just 60% the mass of Jupiter or 2 times the mass of Saturn.
The Orion Nebula lies roughly 1300 light years from Earth in the so-called "sword" of the constellation of Orion the Hunter, and the image shows a region that is 4 by 2.75 light years in size, smaller than the distance between Earth and our nearest stellar neighbour, Proxima Centauri.