SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Carina Nebula Revealed in All Its Glory
from the Guardian (UK)
The Carina Nebula, 7,500 light years from Earth, buzzes with activity. Countless stars are being born among the glowing clouds of dust and gas. Over several million years, this nebula--named after the keel of the mythical ship Argo--has created some of the most massive stars known to astronomers.
... The newly released image was constructed from a mosaic of hundreds of individual pictures from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT). It is the most comprehensive image of the Carina Nebula ever produced using infrared wavelengths of light.
The VLT sits at an altitude of 2,500m, on top of Mount Paranal in the northern Atacama desert in Chile. The dry, dusty desert is almost devoid of life and a perfect place to watch the skies: At night, the bone dry air means the VLT can track and measure stars, black holes and planets with exquisite precision using its four individual observatories. At the heart of each observatory is an 8m-wide mirror made from a single piece of polished glass, the exact shape of which changes 100 times per second to counteract, in real time, the distorting effects of the Earth's atmosphere on the starlight it is trying to detect.
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