Hubble Space Telescope image of part of the Orion Nebula, showing a newly-discovered jet of material (red, upper left) streaming away from a newborn star (centre). Jets such as this provide astonomers with important information about how young stars form. The Orion Nebula is an enormous region of glowing gas and dust where new stars are being born. It is about 7 light years in size and lies some 1500 light years from Earth. The nebula glows in a number of distinct colours, each due to atoms of a different chemical element. This image shows emission from sulphur atoms (red), ionised oxygen atoms (blue) and hydrogen atoms (green).