The image provides a new view on this star-forming region at far-infrared wavelengths, disclosing the intricate structure of filaments, pillars and bubbles that pervades it.
Carved by winds and highly energetic radiation from massive stars, these features recount the history of star formation in the nebula: a result of the delicate balance between stellar feedback effects that may either halt or trigger the production of new generations of stars.
A site of intense star formation, the Carina Nebula complex is home to some of the brightest and most massive stars in our Galaxy, the Milky Way. The intricate network of clouds that populate this prolific cosmic nursery, where tens of thousands of new stars are forming, is revealed in unprecedented detail in a new image obtained with ESA's Herschel Space Observatory.
Observing the sky at far-infrared wavelengths, Herschel enables us to see the glow of cold material, such as the mixture of gas and dust that pervade the Carina Nebula complex. The image combines data acquired with the PACS instrument at 70 micron (shown in blue) and 160 micron (shown in green) and with the SPIRE instrument at 250 micron (shown in red).
As seen in the image, the complex exhibits a rich assortment of bubbles, filaments and pillars, and the various regions of the nebula span a wide range in densities, from diffuse and loosely bound areas to more compact concentrations of matter. Partly responsible for creating this tangled structure are the numerous high-mass stars hosted within this star-forming region - in the central region alone, the Carina Nebula boasts a census of more than a hundred very massive stars of type O, B and Wolf-Rayet.
These include the famous Eta Carinae, a Luminous Blue Variable star with a mass over 100 times that of the Sun; this highly unstable star gives rise to frequent and violent outbursts and is expected to explode as a supernova in the next few hundred thousand years.
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