Supersonic Cosmic Bullets 10 Times The Size of Pluto's Orbit

The Gemini Observatory in Hawaii released the newest and most detailed images of supersonic "bullets" of gas piercing through dense clouds of hydrogen gas in the Orion Nebula.

The latest image of the Orion bullets was created with a new technology, called adaptive optics, which uses a laser guide star as a reference and a rapidly deforming mirror to correct image distortions from the Earth's atmosphere in real time.

The size of each of these bullets is ten times Pluto's orbit around the sun and they travel through the clouds at up to 250 miles (400 kilometers) per second - or about a thousand times faster than the speed of sound.

Molecular hydrogen is what makes up the bullets and the surrounding gas cloud.

The tip of each bullet is packed with iron atoms that are heated by friction and glow bright blue, as seen in the image taken at infrared wavelengths.

The light from the tubular wakes, shown in orange, is from excited hydrogen gas and each measures about a fifth of a light-year, that is around 10 trillion kilometers (6 trillion miles).

Although the Orion bullets have been first spotted in visible-light image in 1983, this is the clearest image ever: "What I find stunning about the new image is the detail it shows, which was blurred out in any previous studies," said Michael Burton of the University of New South Wales, one of the scientists who first suggested the origin of the bullets 15 years ago.

Astronomers generally think the huge gas masses were ejected from deep within the nebula following some unknown violent event about a thousand years ago and are glad that the level of precision acquired by the recent photos will allow them to monitor the evolution of the system over the next few years, as small changes in the structures could appear every year as they continue their journey through the Universe.