Panoramas this stunning deserve a lingering look (and be sure to click the image for a higher resolution view). You’re looking at more of the fruits of the Spitzer Space Telescope’s remarkable labors, this time a false-color image showing a part of the star-forming region known as the Carina Nebula. Using infrared, Spitzer was able to penetrate the so-called ‘South Pillar’ region of the nebula to reveal yellow and white stars in their infancy, wrapped up inside pillars of thick pink dust. The hottest gases here are green; the foreground stars are blue, which shows up better in the enlargement.

The Eta Carina nebulaAnd note the bright area at the top of the frame, which is what this story is all about. The glow is caused by the massive star Eta Carinae, which is too bright to be observed by infrared telescopes. Stellar winds and ultraviolet radiation from this star are what have torn the gas cloud, leaving the tendrils and pillars visible here. It is this ‘shredding’ process that triggers the birth of the new stars Spitzer has revealed. And there is no doubt about what caused the shredding: Eta Carinae radiates energy at a rate five million times that of the Sun, making it the most luminous star known in the Milky Way. It also appears unstable; some scientists believe it is on the edge of becoming a supernova.

Image: This false-color image taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows the “South Pillar” region of the star-forming region called the Carina Nebula. Like cracking open a watermelon and finding its seeds, the infrared telescope “busted open” this murky cloud to reveal star embryos (yellow or white) tucked inside finger-like pillars of thick dust (pink). Hot gases are green and foreground stars are blue. Not all of the newfound star embryos can be easily spotted. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/N. Smith (University of Arizona).

“We knew that stars were forming in this region before, but Spitzer has shown us that the whole environment is swarming with embryonic stars of an unprecedented multitude of different masses and ages,” said Dr. Robert Gehrz, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, a member of the team that made the Spitzer observations.

Spitzer continues to set new standards for infrared observations. Photos of the area in visible light have revealed its finger-like dust pillars, but it took infrared to get inside the clouds to find the incubating stars. We can thus see how a mammoth star (Eta Carinae is 100 times the mass of our Sun) can spawn a new generation of stars. The Carina Nebula itself stretches across 200 light years; it has given birth to a number of mammoth stars which, in turn, have churned the cloud from which they emerged and caused it to collapse into new stars. Some believe our Sun came out of such an environment.

For a series of photographs of Eta Carinae in a variety of wavelengths from optical to x-ray and radio, see this page at the Chandra X-Ray Observatory site. A press release on the latest Spitzer work from the University of Colorado at Boulder is available here.