A team of astronomers has used the HAWK-I camera on ESO’s Very Large Telescope to take the most detailed panorama of the Carina Nebula in infrared light.
The Carina Nebula, imaged in infrared light using the HAWK-I camera on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (ESO / T. Preibisch)
The Carina Nebula is some 7,500 light-years distant in the constellation of the same name – Carina or the Keel.
It is among the brightest nebulae in the sky and one of the closest incubators of very massive stars to the Earth and includes several of the brightest and heaviest stars known. One of them, the mysterious and highly unstable star Eta Carinae (η Carinae or η Car), was the second brightest star in the entire night sky for several years in the 1840s and is likely to explode as a supernova in the near future, by astronomical standards.
Many of its secrets are hidden behind thick clouds of dust. Dusty regions of space absorb and scatter short wavelength blue light more than the longer wavelength red. This effect also explains why sunsets on Earth are often red, particularly when the atmosphere is dusty. In some dusty parts of the sky, particularly in star formation regions such as the Carina Nebula, this effect is so strong that no visible light gets through at all.
According to the European Southern Observatory (ESO), to penetrate this veil a team of astronomers, led by Dr. Thomas Preibisch, used the power of ESO’s Very Large Telescope along with an infrared-sensitive camera called HAWK-I.
The astronomers combined hundreds of individual images to create this picture, which is the most detailed infrared mosaic of the nebula ever taken and one of the most dramatic images ever created by the Very Large Telescope. It shows not just the brilliant massive stars, but hundreds of thousands of much fainter stars that were previously invisible.
The dazzling star Eta Carinae itself appears at the lower left of the new picture. It is surrounded by clouds of gas that are glowing under the onslaught of fierce ultraviolet radiation. Across the image there are also many compact blobs of dark material that remain opaque even in the infrared. These are the dusty cocoons in which new stars are forming.
