Lifting Curtain Behind Orion Nebula

It is said millions of years ago (10 million or 20 million years approx), before the Orion Nebula existed, a group of massive stars formed. These stars were extremely hot and luminous and the ultraviolet light that they emitted stripped apart electrons from interstellar hydrogen gas in all the directions.
This radiation pushed interstellar gas and dust away in an expanding bubble, which give a intense shockwave even more when the stars exploded as supernova. Parts of the bubble's surface grew dense enough to collapse, forming new stars and an especially rich region of star birth set aglow the gas and dust we now call the Orion Nebula.

We know Orion Nebula by far the best known stellar nursery, giving life to thousands of young stars, small and large. It is 1,344 ± 20 light years away from earth, it glows so brightly that it can be even seen with a naked eye. On a clear dark night, the clouds of gases and dusts that makes up this Nebula looks like a fuzzy star.

Some observations revealed that the Orion Nebula lies on the rim of a vast ring of dust that is 330 light-years in diameter, its so large that much of it spills into Monoceros, a constellation east of Orion. If the ring were visible to the naked eye, it would look 27 times wider than the full moon. The Orion Nebula sits in one of its densest sections.

Bally and Christopher McKee, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley says this scenario is plausible but requires confirmation. If the idea is right, the dust ring should be expanding, so scientists will have to measure the dust expansion speed to verify it. Those measurements would also indicate when the expansion began, thereby dating the sequence of events that may have led to the Orion Nebula’s formation.

A new imaging technique has revealed that this great nebula is just a small part of an enormous ring of dust stretching across hundreds of light years. The discovery hints at the nebula’s origins - radiation and explosions of massive stars at the ring's center may have blasted gas and dust outward until some of the material collapsed to give birth to the famous star creator.
No one had previously noticed the ring because foreground and background dust obscures the newfound object. Eddie Schlafly, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany. He and his colleagues found the ring using the 1.8-meter Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii to map interstellar dust. Dust reddens starlight that's one reason the setting sun looks orange or red—so Schlafly's team observed the colors of stars over most of the sky in order to see where interstellar dust lurks. From the colors and distances of 23 million stars the team established how the dust is distributed in three dimensions in and around Orion.

Europe’s new Gaia spacecraft may lend further reveal details as it determines distances and motions of stars throughout the sky. Gaia may reveal stars that have moved away from the ring’s center, siblings of the deceased stars that created the ring, teaching us more about the formation process. 

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