The ‘Mystic Mountain’ is a term for a star-forming region of a giant pillar of gas that lies within the turbulent stellar nursery of the Carina Nebula, and is located 7,500 lightyears away in the southern constellation Carina.
This three lightyear long pillar of thick gas and dust is where baby stars are born, feeding off material inside the craggy tower. From the outside, material is being eroded by savage winds of energetic particles, intense stellar winds and powerful radiation from young stars in open space.
The pressure on the dusty pillar caused by the emissions from these stars is triggering stellar processes inside, producing more newborn stars that will eventually consume their way to freedom, hatching from their nursery like their siblings before them.
The Hubble team poetically describe this “fantasy mountaintop enshrouded by wispy clouds” as “a bizarre landscape from Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ or a Dr. Seuss book, depending on your imagination.”
Who’s going to argue with that!
I’ve consciously cut down my normal description because, sometimes, words are just inadequate to describe some views of the universe when captured through the lens of the Hubble Space Telescope.
This is one of those moments…
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Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)
