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Explanation:The Flame Nebulastands out in this optical image of the dusty, crowdedstar forming regionstoward Orion's belt,a mere 1,400 light-years away.X-ray data from the Chandra Observatory and infrared images fromthe Spitzer Space Telescopecan take you inside theglowing gas and obscuring dust clouds though.Swiping your cursor (or clicking the image) will revealmany stars of the recently formed, embedded clusterNGC 2024, ranging in age from 200,000 years to 1.5 million years young.The X-ray/infraredcomposite image overlay spans about 15 light-yearsacross the Flame's center.The X-ray/infrared data also indicate that the youngest stars areconcentrated near the middle of the Flame Nebula cluster.That's the opposite of the simplest models of star formationfor the stellar nursery that predictstar formationbegins in the denser center of a molecular cloud core.The resultrequires a more complex model; perhapsstar formation continues longer in the center, or older stars areejected from the center due to subcluster mergers.