Latest Carina Nebula Stories
[ Watch the Video: Zooming In On The Planetary Nebula IC 1295 ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new image released by the European Space Observatory (ESO) shows the glowing green planetary nebula IC 1295. The new pictures taken by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) shows the nebula surrounding a dim and dying star located about 3300 light-years away in the constellation of Scutum (The Shield). "It has the unusual feature of being surrounded by multiple shells...
[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new image released by the European Space Observatory (ESO) shows off a spectacular view of the star-forming Carina Nebula, and is being released right in time for an inauguration. Astronomers captured the Carina Nebula using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) Survey Telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory. The image was released on the occasion of the inauguration of the telescope in Naples on Thursday. The...
Videos: Zooming in on the Dark Nebula Barnard 59 | Panning Across the Dark Nebula Barnard 59 Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new image of the Pipe Nebula has been taken using the Wide Field Imager at the European Space Observatory's La Silla Observatory. The Pipe Nebula is a vast dark cloud of interstellar dust, or a dark nebula, which is a type of nebula that consist of stars, but is so thick with dust that it blocks out the light. The dark nebula is...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The cosmos is full of outstanding imagery, and a new image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has shot back another outstanding image back to Earth. The latest image, released on Monday, shows a Flame nebula located in the Orion complex, lighting up a cavern of dust. The Nebula is sitting on the eastern hip of Orion the Hunter, which is a constellation that can be seen with the naked eye in the northern...
Giant bubbles, towering pillars and cascading clouds of dust and gas fill the star-forming nursery of the Carina Nebula seen here in a stunning new view from Herschel. The Carina Nebula is some 7500 lightyears from Earth and hosts some of the most massive and luminous stars in our Galaxy, including double-star system eta Carinae, which boasts over 100 times the mass of our Sun. The total amount of gas and dust traced by ESA’s Herschel space observatory in this image is equivalent to...
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has been at the cutting edge of research into what happens to stars like our sun at the ends of their lives. One stage that stars pass through as they run out of nuclear fuel is called the preplanetary or protoplanetary nebula stage. This Hubble image of the Egg Nebula shows one of the best views to date of this brief but dramatic phase in a star’s life. The preplanetary nebula phase is a short period in the cycle of stellar evolution, and has nothing...
[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] The star cluster NGC 6604 is shown in this new image taken by the Wide Field Imager attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. It is often overlooked in favor of its more prominent neighbor, the Eagle Nebula (also known as Messier 16), that lies a mere wingspan away. But the framing of this picture, which places the star cluster in a landscape of surrounding gas and dust clouds, shows what a beautiful object NGC 6604 is in...
Astronomers recently got a rare opportunity to view a cosmic event that took place from 1837 to 1858 known as the "Great Eruption." The outburst temporarily made Eta Carinae the second brightest star in the sky during that period. Today's astronomers are able to view the event because some of the light from the eruption took an indirect path to Earth and is just now arriving. The light was heading in a different direction, away from our planet, when it bounced off dust lingering far...
[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] ESO’s Very Large Telescope has delivered the most detailed infrared image of the Carina Nebula stellar nursery taken so far. Many previously hidden features, scattered across a spectacular celestial landscape of gas, dust and young stars, have emerged. This is one of the most dramatic images ever created by the VLT. Deep in the heart of the southern Milky Way lies a stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula. It is about 7500 light-years from Earth in the...
[ Watch the Video ] This new view shows a stellar nursery called NGC 3324. It was taken using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. The intense ultraviolet radiation from several of NGC 3324's hot young stars causes the gas cloud to glow with rich colors and has carved out a cavity in the surrounding gas and dust. NGC 3324 is located in the southern constellation of Carina (The Keel, part of Jason’s ship the Argo) roughly 7500...
Latest Carina Nebula Reference Libraries
Rosette Nebula -- Discovered by John Flamsteed about 1690. The Rosetta Nebula is a vast cloud of dust and gas, extending over an area of more than 1 degree across, or about 5 times the area covered by the full moon. Its parts have been assigned different NGC numbers: 2237, 2238, 2239, and 2246. Within the nebula, open star cluster NGC 2244 is situated, consisted of the young stars which recently formed from the nebula's material, and the brightest of which make the nebula shine by...
Lagoon Nebula -- The Lagoon Nebula was discovered by Le Gentil in 1747. As often for diffuse nebulae, the cluster of young stars which has formed from the nebula's material was discovered first. In this case the young open cluster NGC 6530 in the Eastern half of M8 was discovered by Flamsteed about 1680, and again seen by De Ch'seaux in 1746, before Le Gentil found the nebula in 1747. Abbe Nicholas Louis de la Caille has cataloged it in his 1751-52 compilation as Lacaille III.14....
Eta Carinae -- Eta Carinae is a very large (100-150 times as much mass as the Sun) and bright (about 4 million times as bright) star, in the constellation Carina (right ascension 10 h 45.1 m, declination -5941m). The star is surrounded by a large, bright nebula, known as the Eta Carinae Nebula, the Keyhole Nebula, or NGC3372 One remarkable aspect of Eta Carinae is its changing brightness. When it was first catalogued in 1677 by Edmond Halley, it was of the 4th magnitude, but later it...
Dumbbell Nebula -- Discovered by Charles Messier in 1764. The Dumbbell Nebula M27 was the first planetary nebula ever discovered. On July 12, 1764, Charles Messier discovered this new and fascinating class of objects, and describes this one as an oval nebula without stars. We happen to see this one approximately from its equatorial plane (approx. left-to-right in our image); from near one pole, it would probably have the shape of a ring, and perhaps look like we view the Ring...
