The cool clouds of the Eta Carina Nebula, which contains some of the Milky Way’s highest-mass stars, have been imaged using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile.
Also known as NGC 3372, this diffuse haze of dust and mostly hydrogen gas, equivalent to the mass of around 140,000 suns, is located approximately 7500 light-years from Earth, and spans about 150 light-years.
The telescope’s Large Apex BOlometer CAmera (LABOCA) took this wide-field image of Carina’s violent star formation sites with the total mass of stars within the nebula estimated to equivalent to more than 25,000 suns, making it one of the brightest nebulae in our skies.
The dust grains are chilled at around -250°C, and currently only a portion of the gas is dense enough to collapse into new stars within the next 1 million years.
High-mass stars like Eta Carinae, the luminous yellow star at the top left of this image, only live for up to a few million years, unlike our sun, which has a lifespan of 10 billion years. This star is one of the brightest known stars with a mass greater than 100 times the sun, and is set to explode into a supernova during approximately the next 1 million years.
In their youth, such stars generate strong radiation and winds that carve out surrounding clouds, possibly compressing them into new stars. When the stars die, the supernova shockwaves can trigger new star formation.
The APEX telescope complements ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, which is being developed by the ESO and partners. For example, APEX will find multiple targets across wide areas of the sky, which ALMA will then study in detail.
APEX is a single prototype antenna constructed for the ALMA project. ALMA will comprise 54 antennae with 12-metre diameters, and a further 12 antennae with 7-metre diameters.
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