"Inside the Image // Hubble Space Telescope" "Carina Nebula"
People ask me sometimes,
"what is my favorite Hubble image?" It's actually the mosaic that Hubble took of the
Carina nebula. It's in the constellation Carina in the southern hemisphere.
It's just an area of the galaxy where material has collected together. Our galaxy is what's called a
spiral galaxy, it has a bright center with a lot of material in it, and then these spiral arms
coming out of it. If you look in areas around the spiral arms, where material is collected together
over many many millions of years, and this is one of the areas where the conditions were just right,
where the magnetic fields, where the pressure from surrounding stars conspired to push it
all together and create this massive cloud of dust and gas. The Hubble Space Telescope has
a relatively narrow field of view it's built to zoom in and look at individual objects so when we
want to appreciate an object of the size we have to create what's called a mosaic, where we take
multiple images and very carefully align them and stack them together. It's so large you can't see
it in a single image you have to piece together hundreds of images to cover the entire area.
Lots of variations in temperature of the gas and dust so the bright material that you see in here
is hot material that has been heated up by the embedded stars. The really dark clouds are cool,
very dense clouds of dust and gas they tend to be dustier than these bright areas which are
dominated by gas. You see here Mystic Mountain which is an example of a star formation area.
The top of Mystic Mountain is down to the left and then the base of it is out this way, so as you see
Mystic Mountain is only a tiny fraction of the complex beauty of this nebula.
You see way over here this bright spot which if you zoom is like a dumbbell shape,
Eta Carinae which is a red giant that's a star in the process of dying in the last
stages of stellar evolution and it's blowing material off. So you span the entire range
of the evolution of a single star from its birth to its death and everything in between.
All through this nebula so collectively it's an immense factory of forming star systems and
we hope planets around those star systems. So this is an image you can download from
the Hubble site and it's it's got enough data and depth in it you can print it out to go on
your wall. That's How many pixels it's got it and you can download it on a computer and just
zoom in and see the kind of detail you saw in Mystic Mountain anywhere else in this mosaic.
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