In Stunning Color, a Celestial “Treasure Chest” Full of Stars
SMRTR summary
Somewhere in the constellation Carina, 7,500 light-years from Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope has captured something that looks almost too whimsical to be real: a cosmic "treasure chest."
The image, named Picture of the Month by NASA and its partner space agencies, shows a glowing orange cometary globule, a giant cloud of gas and dust shaped uncannily like an opened box, complete with a lid.
Inside? Around 70 young stars, including one rare O-type star nearly 19 times the mass of our sun.
But the chest's striking shape didn't happen by chance. Powerful stellar winds and radiation from the massive Eta Carinae star system, just 39 light-years away, have been slowly sculpting and stripping away the surrounding gas and dust for over a million years.
What remains is one of the most visually arresting glimpses yet into the violent, beautiful machinery of star formation.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to Nautilus.
Read the original article