Carving the Orion Nebula

I've written many times about the Orion Nebula, one of the most magnificent star-forming regions in the galaxy. It's a spectacular gas cloud, wispy and sculpted, multicolored and bright. It's only about 1,400 light-years from Earth, making it close enough to study in detail. What you see isn't really what you get in the nebula, though. The visible portion is just a cavity in the side of a much larger dark complex of gas and dust called the Orion Molecular Cloud. This is cold material, so it does...