Carina Nebula revealed in all its glory

The European Southern Observatory has released the most detailed infrared image of the Carina Nebula ever created

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.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

At the lower left is the highly unstable star Eta Carinae, which astronomers believe will one day explode into a supernova – when it will briefly shine more brightly than the rest of our galaxy. The brighter star near the centre of the image is Trumpler 14. Dotted across the picture are many small dark patches: these are huge clouds of dust that shroud new stars that are only just beginning to shine.

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.

The VLT infrared survey of the Carina Nebula, led by Thomas Preibisch of University Observatory Munich, has revealed many previously unseen features that will occupy scientists for years to come. The yellow stars on the left of the image, for example, cannot be seen in visible light, as is the case with hundreds of thousands of fainter stars scattered across the nebula. The full results are described in a research paper published on Wednesday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.