Just 1,500 light years away, the Orion Nebula is one of the closest star formation regions to Earth. This composite image of the central region of Orion was taken by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope.

The bright blue and orange spots in this image are young stars captured in X-ray light by a long series of Chandra observations. These observations, lasting almost 13 days, allowed astronomers to monitor the activity of Sun-like stars.

The young stars were seen to flare in their X-ray intensity much more than our Sun does today. This suggests that our Sun had many violent and energetic outbursts when it was much younger.

The pink and purple wispy filaments are clouds of gas and dust as seen by Hubble in optical light. This gas and dust will one day condense into disks of material from which future generations of stars will be born.

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