Marking the
17th anniversary of the deployment of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, a team of
astronomers is releasing one of the largest panoramic images ever taken with
Hubble's cameras, a 50-light-year-wide view of the central region of the Carina
Nebula with greatly enhanced detail.
What
appears as an impressionist painting is rather an enormous maelstrom of star
birth and death. The nebula is approximately 7,500 light-years away in
the southern constellation Carina the
Keel. This image is a 48-frame mosaic assembled from taken with Hubble
Space Telescope's Advanced
Camera for Surveys. The images were taken in the light of neutral hydrogen.
Red corresponds to sulfur, green to hydrogen, and blue to oxygen emission.
The
filamentous appearance of the nebula has been shaped by outflowing
winds and scorching ultraviolet radiation from the gigantic stars within. In
the process, these stars are shredding the surrounding material marking the
last vestiges of the giant cloud from which the stars were born.
The immense
nebula contains over a dozen brilliant stars estimated at least 50 to 100 times
the mass of our Sun. The most unique of these is the star Eta Carinae, at far left, in
the final stages of its brief and eruptive lifespan,
The
nebula's first generation of newborn stars condensed and ignited three million
years ago in a cloud of cold molecular hydrogen. Radiation from these stars
carved out an expanding bubble of hot gas. The dark clouds visible across the
nebula are nodules of dust and gas that are resisting being eaten away by photoionization.
The stellar
winds and blistering ultraviolet radiation blasting within the cavity now
compresses the surrounding walls of cold hydrogen, triggering a second stage of
new star formation. Our Sun and solar system may have form inside a similar
cosmic crucible 4.6 billion years ago. The Carina Nebula displays the genesis
of star making as it commonly occurs along the dense spiral arms of a galaxy.
--Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Space.com Staff
Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
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