The Flame Nebula or NGC 2024 is a large star-forming region in the constellation Orion that lies about 1,400 light-years from Earth. Hubble studied this nebula to look for protoplanetary disks, or "proplyds" - disks of gas and dust around stars that may one day form new solar systems.
Hubble found four confirmed proplyds and four possible proplyds in the nebula, but the proplyds are being worn away by the intense radiation of nearby stars and may never have the chance to form planets as a result.
Hubble also located three "globulettes" in the nebula - small, dark dust clouds that can be seen against the background of bright nebulae. These dust clouds are thought to form brown dwarfs - warm objects too big to be planets but without enough mass to become stars - and other free-floating, planetary-mass objects in our galaxy
The Flame Nebula is part of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, which includes such famous nebulae as the Horsehead Nebula and Orion Nebula.
Related Links
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Lands Beyond Beyond - extra solar planets - news and science
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NASA announces discovery of 301 new exoplanets
Washington DC (UPI) Nov 22, 2021
NASA scientists have discovered another 301 exoplanets - those outside the solar system. The new discoveries bring the total of validated exoplanets to 4,569 since the discovery of the first ones in the mid-1990s. NASA said Monday that the discoveries can be attributed to a new network called ExoMiner, that leverages NASA's Supercomputer, Pleiades, and can distinguish real exoplanets from different types of impostors, or "false positives." Deep neural networks are machine-learnin ... read more