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Black Hole

A black hole is an astronomical object whose gravity is so strong that nothing—even light—can escape from within its event horizon. It forms when a massive star’s core collapses or through other processes, and may have an accretion disk of infalling matter that emits radiation. Supermassive black holes at galaxy centers influence stellar orbits, and mergers produce gravitational waves.

Source: nasa.gov

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Trapezium: In the Heart of Orion

13/08/2025

Trapezium: In the Heart of Orion
Image Credit: NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

What lies in the heart of Orion? Trapezium: four bright stars, that can be found near the center of this sharp cosmic portrait. Gathered within a region about 1.5 light-years in radius, these stars dominate the core of the dense Orion Nebula Star Cluster. Ultraviolet ionizing radiation from the Trapezium stars, mostly from the brightest star Theta-1 Orionis C powers the complex star forming region's entire visible glow. About three million years old, the Orion Nebula Cluster was even more compact in its younger years and a dynamical study indicates that runaway stellar collisions at an earlier age may have formed a black hole with more than 100 times the mass of the Sun. The presence of a black hole within the cluster could explain the observed high velocities of the Trapezium stars. The Orion Nebula's distance of some 1,500 light-years make it one of the closest candidate black holes to Earth.