Carina’s Misty Mountains

Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hub­ble 20th Anniver­sary Team (STScI)

Tow­er­ing over the land­scape of the Carina Neb­ula, a sur­real, mist-enshrouded, moun­tain­scape awaits trav­el­ers today. This dra­matic image cel­e­brates the 20th anniver­sary of the launch of NASA’s Hub­ble Space Telescope.

NASA describes the 20th Anniver­sary Hub­ble image as a bizarre land­scape “out of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or a Dr. Seuss book.” This awe­some image shows the tur­bu­lent activ­ity atop a three-light-year-tall pil­lar of gas and dust. Explore the image. The Carina Neb­ula is one of the Milky Way Galaxy’s largest stel­lar nurs­eries. New stars are being born inside the tow­er­ing pil­lar of gas and dust. The entire pil­lar is being eaten away and shaped by the scorch­ing winds and radi­a­tion of nearby super-hot stars. Look­ing like wispy clouds, streams of hot gas can be seen flow­ing away from the ridges and val­leys. Astronomers call this photo-evaporation.

Look for pairs of jets; one near the top of the high­est pil­lar and another near the top of the left-most pil­lar. Astronomers look for these signs of new star birth. They are called Herbig-Haro objects. The jets are caused when swirling disks of mate­r­ial fall onto the sur­face of the new­born stars and is blasted back into space.

The Carina Neb­ula is a huge stel­lar nurs­ery located in our galaxy about 7,500 light-years from Earth toward the south­ern con­stel­la­tion of Carina, the Keel. Carina is part of the old con­stel­la­tion of Argo Navis. Although the orig­i­nal con­stel­la­tion was named after the ship in the Greek myth of Jason and the Arg­onauts, the col­lec­tion of stars was not vis­i­ble to Greeks or Romans. Ptolemy listed the group­ing as part of his list of 48 con­stel­la­tions. French astronomer Nico­las Louis de Lacaille divided the larger con­stel­la­tion into three smaller groups in 1752.