wehadfacesthen: By Henri Cartier-Bresson, Coney Island, 1946.

Mon, 06 May 2013 17:02:22 -0400

By Henri Cartier-Bresson, Coney Island, 1946.

Photo

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 11:33:45 -0400

Dust Pillar of the Carina Nebula Inside the head of this...

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 09:07:41 -0400

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.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (U. California, Berkeley) et al., and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

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.

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wehadfacesthen: By Henri Cartier-Bresson, Coney Island, 1946.

Photo

Dust Pillar of the Carina Nebula Inside the head of this...