Bright Babies

Like fireflies on a summer night or fairy lights on a Christmas tree, newborn stars twinkle through the wispy clouds of the Orion Nebula in this new infrared view from the Herschel and Spitzer space telescopes. The stars, which form a chain to the upper right of center, are still emerging from their own cocoons of gas and dust. The nebula, which is visible to the unaided eye as a faint smudge of light below Orion's Belt, has given birth to thousands of stars. Eventually, the radiation from all the newborn stars will blow away the remaining gas, destroying the nebula and closing this productive stellar nursery. [ESA/NASA/JPL/IRAM]