Carina Nebula
 Thousands of stars have been born from this vast cloud of gas and dust known as the Carina Nebula, and thousands more are taking shape today. The largest stars are dozens of times as massive as the Sun, so they shine thousands of times brighter. These hot, massive stars are causing the gas in the nebula to shine like the inside of a fluorescent bulb, while stripping away some of the gas and shutting down the process of starbirth. This infrared image is from the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope. [Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/N. Smith (UC-Boulder)]
One of the biggest stellar nurseries in the galaxy is the Carina Nebula. It's about 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina, the keel. Earlier this year, astronomers counted 17,000 newborn stars in one region of the nebula. The entire cluster may consist of a hundred thousand stars.
Astronomers used the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope to count the stars. Many of the stars are still surrounded by clouds of gas and dust, which hides them from view from most telescopes. But Spitzer looks at the infrared energy from the young stars, which shines through the gas and dust.
Spitzer took several hundred pictures of the Carina Nebula this spring. The images revealed a few hot, massive stars, and many more smaller stars.
The bout of starbirth is driven by several of the massive stars, including the most massive of all, Eta Carinae. It's one of the heaviest stars in the galaxy. A steady "wind" of gas blows off its surface. As this wind rams into the gas and dust in the surrounding nebula, it squeezes the material into denser clumps. These clumps then condense under their own gravitational pull until they're dense enough to form new stars.
Script by Damond Benningfield, Copyright 2005
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