Posted on 03/23/2013 10:21:56 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Explanation: Inside the head of this interstellar monster is a star that is slowly destroying it. The monster, actually an inanimate pillar of gas and dust, measures over a light year in length. The star, not itself visible through the opaque dust, is bursting out partly by ejecting energetic beams of particles. Similar epic battles are being waged all over the star-forming Carina Nebula (NGC 3372). The stars will win in the end, destroying their pillars of creation over the next 100,000 years, and resulting in a new open cluster of stars. The pink dots are newly formed stars that have already been freed from their birth monster. The above image is only a small part of a highly detailed panoramic mosaic of the Carina Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2007. The technical name for the stellar jets are Herbig-Haro objects. How a star creates Herbig-Haro jets is an ongoing topic of research, but it likely involves an accretion disk swirling around a central star. A second impressive Herbig-Haro jet is visible across the bottom of a larger image.
(Excerpt) Read more at 129.164.179.22 ...
[Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (U. California, Berkeley) et al., and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)]
I love the complete lack of smell of nebulas in the morning.
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Inside the head of this interstellar monster is a star that is slowly destroying it. The monster, actually an inanimate pillar of gas and dust, measures over a light year in length. The star, not itself visible through the opaque dust, is bursting out partly by ejecting energetic beams of particles. Similar epic battles are being waged all over the star-forming Carina Nebula (NGC 3372). The stars will win in the end, destroying their pillars of creation over the next 100,000 years, and resulting in a new open cluster of stars. The pink dots are newly formed stars that have already been freed from their birth monster. The above image is only a small part of a highly detailed panoramic mosaic of the Carina Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2007. The technical name for the stellar jets are Herbig-Haro objects. How a star creates Herbig-Haro jets is an ongoing topic of research, but it likely involves an accretion disk swirling around a central star. A second impressive Herbig-Haro jet is visible across the bottom of a larger image.
LightYear To measure really long distances, people use a unit called a light year. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second). Therefore, a light second is 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers). A light year is the distance that light can travel in a year, or: 186,000 miles/second * 60 seconds/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year = 5,865,696,000,000 miles/year
The whole image is pretty awesome.
This is one of the best images I have seen!
Just...WOW!
Thank You, Sunken Civ!
Zeus - is that you?
(cool pic, btw)
“What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?”
Thanks, all!
I see a mooooosehead. hmmmm. Thx.
“Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.”
Dr. Seuss
Dr. Seuss may have been funky
But he Never took the trouble
To show a nebula with a chunky
As seen by a Hubble.
Is it just me, or is that nebula hung like a horse ?
“Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.”
Dr. Seuss
—
probably a good thing my telescope is dust covered and stowed away.. I get in enough trouble with the neighbors as is. :-}
You should install one of these in your yard.
Nebula don't surf.
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