Dust Pillar of the
Carina Nebula
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 image
below 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.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (U. California, Berkeley) et al., and
The Hubble
Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
