Star Puffer

Credit: NASA, NASA, ESA and the Hub­ble SM4 ERO Team

The Carina Neb­ula reminds me of a coral reef with all the rich col­ors and glow­ing scenery. We missed what looks to me like a puffer fish dur­ing our last look at the Carina Neb­ula when we found sea mon­sters, birds and cos­mic cater­pil­lars.

Leave a com­ment and let us know what else you see.

Scorch­ing radi­a­tion is sculpt­ing this stel­lar nurs­ery in the Carina Neb­ula. This new image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope shows only the tip of a three light-year long pil­lar of gas and dust. Fast winds from hot, new stars are caus­ing the tops to evap­o­rate, what astronomers call pho­to­e­vap­o­ra­tion. You can see the stream­ers of gas and dust flow­ing away from the pil­lar. The solar wind also pushes the gas and dust together into clumps. These clumps may one day fall in on them­selves under grav­ity and begin to glow, becom­ing new stars.

This image was taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Cam­era 3. Astro­nauts onboard the Space Shut­tle Atlantis (STS-125) installed the new cam­era in May 2009. The cam­era will allow sci­en­tists to peer even deeper into the uni­verse and give clearer views of closer objects.

From side to side, the entire Carina Neb­ula spans 300 light years. A light year is the dis­tance light trav­els in a year, about 6 tril­lion miles. It is a very large neb­ula in Earth’s skies but it lies far in the south­ern hemi­sphere so it is not well known. Astronomer Nico­las Louis de Lacaille dis­cov­ered the neb­ula in 1751–52 dur­ing a sci­ence trip to the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa.

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