How can you travel to distant stars from the comfort of your own home? It's easy with the new Orion Explorer, the latest installment in NRAO's interactive Milky Way Explorer. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF
Imagine an up-close view of a red supergiant star, a peek inside a
glowing nebula churning out new stars, and spying a myriad of other
objects in our galaxy as you have never seen them before – in invisible
radio light! That is the experience you will get through the National
Radio Astronomy Observatory’s (NRAO) newly released Orion Explorer installment of its popular Milky Way Explorer, an online tour of our interstellar neighborhood guided by the actual astronomers who study it using radio waves.
Through
an entertaining and informative series of videos, NRAO’s Science
Visualization Team presents multimedia-rich tours of the stars Bellatrix
and Betelgeuse, stellar masers, snowlines around young stars, and much
more. At each stop along the way, astronomers reveal the new science and
exciting details we have learned about one of the most recognizable
star patterns in the night sky, the constellation of Orion.
Unlike
familiar optical telescopes, which can only study objects illuminated
by stars, radio telescopes can see the otherwise invisible cold, dark
features in space. This includes the faint radio light that is naturally
emitted by the molecules and chemicals that make up vast interstellar
clouds where new stars are born, like the Orion Nebula.
The Milky Way Explorer,
which was launched in 2013, also includes dozens more videos showcasing
the diverse radio astronomy studies of our home galaxy and its
environs.
The
National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National
Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated
Universities, Inc.
For more information, contact:
Alexandra Angelich
aangelic@nrao.edu
