(ORDO NEWS) — This new image shows a small patch of the Carina Nebula, one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s most popular targets.
The Carina Nebula (NGC 3372) is a huge cloud of gas and dust that contains several massive and bright stars. The mass of at least a dozen of them is 50-100 times the mass of our Sun.
NGC 3372 is an emission nebula. The intense radiation emanating from its stars ionizes the gas and causes it to glow.
The Carina Nebula is a dynamic region of the sky where, along with the death of stars, bursts of star formation occur.
As stars form and produce ultraviolet radiation, their stellar winds scatter the gas and dust around them, sometimes forming dark, dusty cloaks, and sometimes leaving empty patches through which the stars are clearly visible.
This image shows only a small area of ​​the nebula, located near the center, in an area with more rarefied gas.
Because of the nebula’s sheer size – about 300 light-years – astronomers can only study it piecemeal, combining data from individual images to get an idea of ​​the nebula’s large-scale structure and composition.
The Carina Nebula is visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere of the Earth.
The nebula is located about 7500 light years from Earth in the constellation Carina.
Over the past few hundred years, astronomers have given it many nicknames, including the Great Nebula and the Eta Carina Nebula (because of the bright star at its center).
It was discovered by Nicholas Louis de Lacaille in 1752 from the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.
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