I am Joel Block.

And I am Deborah Byrd. Like people, stars are born. They live, and they die. Each year, our Milky Way Galaxy is thought to give birth to about 10 new stars. These stars are born in great clouds of gas and dust, which astronomers sometimes call "stellar nurseries. "

And now, there is news of a new distance to the most famous stellar nursery of all. That’s the Orion Nebula, a cloud of gas and dust that has forged more than 3,000 new stars, according to the estimates of astronomers.

Previously, the distance to the Orion Nebula was estimated at about 1,500 or 1,600 light years. But the Orion Nebula is actually closer than that, according to Rob Jefferies at Keele University in England. He studied 34 stars spawned by the nebula. By comparing how fast the stars spin with their rotation rates, he deduced the stars’ size. He then could calculate how much light the stars emit into space.

And then, he compared that with how much light we see from them and deduced a closer distance for the Orion Nebular of only 1,300 light years. The new distance increases the estimated age of the Orion Nebula's stars to 1.5 million years, still infants in contrast to our middle-aged sun.

Our thanks today to Research Corporation, a foundation for the advancement of science. We are Block and Byrd for Earth & Sky.