| Externally Illuminated Young Stellar Environments in the Orion Nebula: Hubble Space Telescope Planetary Camera and UV Observations (2007) | |||||||||||||||
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| We present new 0.05 00 (22 AU) resolution narrow-band Hubble Space Telescope Planetary Camera images of externally illuminated young stellar objects embedded in the Orion Nebula. We also present 0.02 00 (9 AU) resolution UV images of 7 externally illuminated proto-stellar environments and the first UV spectra that cover the spectral range between 1400 and 3000 A. We discuss 43 objects for which the angular resolution has been improved over previous data by more than a factor of two. These young stellar objects are either embedded inside the Orion Nebula and externally illuminated by the Trapezium stars or located in front of the nebula and seen in silhouette. The visibility of young stars surrounded by diffuse matter is dominated by intense line emission from ionization fronts propagating into material photo--ablated from circumstellar disks by soft UV radiation. Near the Trapezium stars, the electron density at these ionization fronts is around 10 5 to 10 6 cm \Gamma3 and th... | |||||||||||||||
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