ORION

Pronunciation (US):

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does Orion mean? 

• ORION (noun)
  The noun ORION has 2 senses:

1. (Greek mythology) a giant Boeotian hunter who pursued the Pleiades and was eventually slain by Artemis; was then placed in the sky as a constellation

2. a constellation on the equator to the east of Taurus; contains Betelgeuse and Rigel

  Familiarity information: ORION used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ORION (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

(Greek mythology) a giant Boeotian hunter who pursued the Pleiades and was eventually slain by Artemis; was then placed in the sky as a constellation

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Instance hypernyms:

mythical being (an imaginary being of myth or fable)

Domain category:

Greek mythology (the mythology of the ancient Greeks)

Sense 2

Meaning:

A constellation on the equator to the east of Taurus; contains Betelgeuse and Rigel

Classified under:

Nouns denoting natural objects (not man-made)

Synonyms:

Hunter; Orion

Hypernyms ("Orion" is a kind of...):

diffuse nebula; gaseous nebula (a cluster of stars within an intricate cloud of gas and dust)

Instance hypernyms:

constellation (a configuration of stars as seen from the earth)

Meronyms (members of "Orion"):

Alpha Orionis; Betelgeuse (the second brightest star in Orion)

 Context examples 

The new results strongly suggest that star formation in the Orion Nebula Cluster is proceeding in bursts, and more quickly than had been previously thought.

(A Tale of Three Stellar Cities, ESO)

W40 is about 1,400 light-years from the Sun, about the same distance as the well-known Orion nebula, although the two are almost 180 degrees apart in the sky.

('Space Butterfly' Is Home to Hundreds of Baby Stars, NASA)

Whether it formed in a low-mass stellar region like Serpens, or a high-mass stellar region like Orion, is an ongoing mystery.

(The 'Serpent' star-forming cloud hatches new stars, NASA)

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have captured the unprecedented dimming of Betelgeuse, a red supergiant star in the constellation of Orion.

(ESO Telescope Sees Surface of Dim Betelgeuse, ESO)

1350 light years away, in the constellation of Orion (the Hunter), lies a dense and active star formation factory called the Orion Molecular Cloud 1 (OMC-1), part of the same complex as the famous Orion Nebula.

(ALMA Captures Dramatic Stellar Fireworks, ESO)

1350 light years away, in the constellation of Orion (the Hunter), lies a dense and active star formation factory called the Orion Molecular Cloud 1 (OMC-1), part of the same complex as the famous Orion Nebula.

(Dramatic Stellar Fireworks of Star Birth, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

OmegaCAM — the wide-field optical camera on ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST) — has captured the spectacular Orion Nebula and its associated cluster of young stars in great detail, producing a beautiful new image.

(A Tale of Three Stellar Cities, ESO)

The region is noteworthy as it only contains stars of relatively low to moderate mass, and lacks any of the massive and incredibly bright stars found in larger star-forming regions like the Orion nebula.

(The 'Serpent' star-forming cloud hatches new stars, NASA)

A team led by ESO astronomer Giacomo Beccari has used these data of unparallelled quality to precisely measure the brightness and colours of all the stars in the Orion Nebula Cluster.

(A Tale of Three Stellar Cities, ESO)