Space buffs will recognize the Keyhole Nebula. Scientists with the Hubble Space
Telescope project this week released this new image of the nebula that reveals
previously unseen details.
The picture is a montage assembled from four different April 1999 telescope pointings with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, which used six different color filters.
The Keyhole sits within the Carina Nebula, also called NGC 3372.
The large roughly circular feature is the keyhole, and it's about 7 light-years across. It contains both bright filaments of hot gas and dark silhouetted clouds of cold molecules and dust, all of which are in rapid, chaotic motion. Two striking large, sharp-edged dust clouds are located near the bottom center and upper-left edges of the image. These large dark clouds may eventually evaporate or, if there are sufficiently dense condensations within them, give birth to small star clusters, said Hubble scientists.
The scene is lit partly by the variable star Eta Carinae, an explosive one
that sits just outside the picture to the upper right. The Carina Nebula contains
several other stars that are among the hottest and most massive known, each
about 10 times as hot, and 100 times as massive, as our Sun.
