CARINA NEBULA : 無料・フリー素材/写真
CARINA NEBULA / TailspinT
| ライセンス | クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示 2.1 |
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| 説明 | Here's a stunning new image of a part of the Carina Nebula captured by the Hubble Space telescope on Feb 1-2, 2010.That tower of dust is 3 light years tall from bottom to top, and it's about 7500 light years from here (4,408,874,860,000,000 miles more or less). To put that in context, the light from this image left about the time humans started using metal tools, built the first boats, and one of our human genes mutated and made it possible for adults to start drinking milk!All along the sides of the brown dusty towers you can see wispy streamers of light colored material that looks like it's streaming out of the structures. In fact, it stuff blowing by, screaming by at a million kilometers per hour. Look carefully and you'll see shock waves, that attest to the tremendous forces involved. The most obvious is on the left end of the 'T" at the top.That odd T-shaped jet of particles at the top, produced by a 'baby' star being formed inside, is hundreds of times the size of our solar system which is only about 8.5 light hours across (0.000963 light years)! In other words, our whole solar system is so small you wouldn't even be able to see it in this picture! Yet this structure is part of and inside our galaxy which is about 100,000 light years across.The closest other galaxy is Andromeda, 2.5 million light years away. And there's nothing between out here and there; no stars, no dust, no nuttin'. (if you don't count dark matter and dark energy, that is, which represent 94% of the mass of universe, and we can't even see it!) All this amazing stuff we can see and it's only about 6% of the universe.Why do we think we're so special?Here are the details from NASA:"This craggy fantasy mountaintop enshrouded by wispy clouds looks like a bizarre landscape from Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" or a Dr. Seuss book, depending on your imagination. The NASA Hubble Space Telescope image, which is even more dramatic than fiction, captures the chaotic activity atop a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being assaulted from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks.This turbulent cosmic pinnacle lies within a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina. The image celebrates the 20th anniversary of Hubble's launch and deployment into an orbit around Earth.Scorching radiation and fast winds (streams of charged particles) from super-hot newborn stars in the nebula are shaping and compressing the pillar, causing new stars to form within it. Streamers of hot ionized gas can be seen flowing off the ridges of the structure, and wispy veils of gas and dust, illuminated by starlight, float around its towering peaks. The denser parts of the pillar are resisting being eroded by radiation much like a towering butte in Utah's Monument Valley withstands erosion by water and wind.Nestled inside this dense mountain are fledgling stars. Long streamers of gas can be seen shooting in opposite directions off the pedestal at the top of the image. Another pair of jets is visible at another peak near the center of the image. These jets (known as HH 901 and HH 902, respectively) are the signpost for new star birth. The jets are launched by swirling disks around the young stars, which allow material to slowly accrete onto the stars' surfaces.Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 observed the pillar on Feb. 1-2, 2010. The colors in this composite image correspond to the glow of oxygen (blue), hydrogen and nitrogen (green), and sulfur (red)."Huge images available at www.hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2010/13/im... |
| 撮影日 | 2010-04-25 18:52:01 |
| 撮影者 | TailspinT , San Diego CA, USA |
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