The Carina Nebula lies at a distance of 6,500-10,000 lightyears from Earth. This image, one of the highest-resolution panoramas ever assembled by the Hubble Space Telescope and released by The Space Telescope Science Institute, covers a region of the nebula that is 50 lightyears wide.
Formed 3 million years ago and, far from being an inert cloud, it contains over 14,000 stars. This immense nebula also contains at least a dozen brilliant stars that are roughly estimated to be at least 50 to 100 times the mass of our Sun, and is four times as large, and even brighter, than the famous Orion Nebula.
The Carina Nebula is much less well known but has a fantasy-like landscape sculpted by the action of highly dynamic winds and searing ultraviolet radiation from the gigantic stars that inhabit this inferno, which are now compressing the surrounding walls of cold hydrogen. This is triggering a second stage of new star formation.
In the centre-left of the image, you can make out Eta Carinae. It’s one of the biggest stars in the galaxy, which radiates 5 million times more power than our Sun. Now nearing the end of its life, it is expected to go supernova imminently, with some astronomers believing it could explode at any time in the next millennium.
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Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
