Hills and Valleys

Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hub­ble Her­itage Team (STScI/AURA)

Hills and val­leys make up the starry land­scape of the star-forming region of NGC 3324. This image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space tele­scope shows the edge of a giant cav­ity of gas. Glow­ing blue light sets the back­drop for wisps of gas and dark trunks of dust. Ultra­vi­o­let radi­a­tion and howl­ing solar winds from a clus­ter of extremely mas­sive and hot young stars out­side the image, are caus­ing the neb­ula to glow. The stars are also push­ing gas and dust away from the cen­ter to form the wall of the cavity.

Look in the blue area near the edge and find wispy ten­drils of gas com­ing from the edge of the cloud. The blis­ter­ing radi­a­tion is caus­ing the edge of the cloud to evap­o­rate. This process slowly erodes the edge of the neb­ula. A dark tower of gas and dust, just left of cen­ter, points toward the source of the strong cur­rent of solar wind. The pil­lar reaches more than a light-year into the cav­ity and is resist­ing the strong solar wind. This tower, sim­i­lar to tow­ers seen in Eagle Neb­ula, may become new stars one day. As the dust and gas are pushed and com­pressed by the solar wind, it might begin to col­lapse under its own grav­ity. If enough mate­r­ial is avail­able, a star is born and begins to glow. The edge of the cloud we see in this image is just a por­tion of a huge cav­ity of gas that is dozens of light-years across. The dis­tance between the Sun and the near­est star, Alpha Cen­tauri, could eas­ily fit inside this nebula.

NGC 3324 is located in the Carina Neb­ula, a huge star-making neb­ula about 7,200 light-years away. The Carina Neb­ula lies in the south­ern con­stel­la­tion Carina, the Keel, and is home to the Key­hole Neb­ula and Eta Carina, an active star.