Busy Nursery

A stellar nebula that may have enough gas and dust to make almost one million stars as massive as the Sun forms giant bubbles, streamers, and loops in this false-color infrared image from the space-based Herschel Observatory. The Carina Nebula, which has already given birth to some of the most massive stars in the galaxy, is centered about 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina, the keel. The large circular region at top right is a bubble in the gas cleared away by radiation from a cluster of hot, young stars. [ESA/PACS/SPIRE/Thomas Preibisch (Universitäts-Sternwarte München, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)]