Technicolour collision

ATACAMA LARGE MILLIMETER/ SUBMILLIMETER ARRAY, 7 APRIL 2017

These multicoloured fireworks are the remnants of a 500-year-old stellar explosion, the seeds of which were sown about 100,000 years ago, 1,350 lightyears away in the Orion Molecular Cloud, a dense area of star formation close to the Orion Nebula. Several protostars that formed in this region are thought to have collided, causing an explosion that fired other young stars, along with cosmic gas and dust, into space at speeds over 150km/s. This single explosion generated as much energy as our own Sun does over a period of 10 million years.