Carina Nebula
The Carina Nebula (NGC 3372) — one of the largest and brightest star-forming regions in the Galaxy, about 7,500 light-years away in the far-southern constellation Carina and spanning hundreds of light-years. It holds some of the most massive, violent stars known, including the unstable supergiant Eta Carinae, which erupted in the 1840s to briefly become the second-brightest star in the sky and now sits inside the dumbbell-shaped Homunculus Nebula it threw off.
Science
Physical
- Type
- Giant H II region + massive young star clusters
- Distance
- ~7,500 light-years
- Size
- Hundreds of light-years across (~2° on the sky)
- Notable stars
- Eta Carinae (luminous blue variable), WR 25, HD 93129A
How we know
- Note
- The image is a REAL ESO wide-field mosaic (VLT Survey Telescope, CC BY 4.0), shown as a camera-facing billboard at the nebula's real position — presented as seen from Earth (its true 3-D shape cannot be shown).
Discovery & history
- Name
- Named for the constellation Carina, the Keel of the ancient ship Argo; also the Eta Carinae Nebula for its most famous star. NGC 3372 in the New General Catalogue.
Catalogued by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille from the Cape of Good Hope in 1751-52. Its centrepiece, Eta Carinae, was watched through its 19th-century 'Great Eruption'; Hubble and, later, JWST (whose 'Cosmic Cliffs' show one wall, in the nearby region NGC 3324) have imaged its sculpted ridges of gas in fine detail.
Images
Images from open archives · credit shown per image