Cosmic Caterpillar

Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley), and The Hub­ble Her­itage Team (STScI/AURA)

We con­tinue our jour­ney, explor­ing the giant crea­tures lurk­ing in the glow­ing gas of the Carina Neb­ula.

In this part of the image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope, we find a cos­mic cater­pil­lar hang­ing in the dust clouds. Actu­ally this is a dense glob of gas and dust. They are called Bok glob­ules. In the 1940s, astronomer Bart Bok first observed the dark globs of gas. Won­der­ing what they could be, he the­o­rized that these clouds are sim­i­lar to cocoons. He believed that the blobs were pulling together under grav­ity and even­tu­ally would form into a new star or star clus­ter. This was a hard thing to prove because with our eyes we can­not see into the clouds. In the 1990s, with the help of infrared tele­scopes, sci­en­tists showed that there were warm objects within the glob­ules. Stars were being born inside.

The Carina Neb­ula is about 7,500 light-years away toward the con­stel­la­tion Carina the Keel. Carina is a con­stel­la­tion in the south­ern hemi­sphere. it is part of an older con­stel­la­tion group called Argo Navis, after the ship that car­ried Jason and the Arg­onauts.