214-NASA – A 3D Trip into the Carina Nebula

This is a three-dimensional trip into a giant “mountain” of cool hydrogen and dust in the Carina Nebula, a vast star-forming region in our Milky Way Galaxy. The nebula is too far away for Hubble Space Telescope to see in true three dimensions. But this visualization creates foreground and background elements based on an approximation of how the region might be distributed in a 3-D volume. A virtual camera flies through this synthesized space to create a 3-D effect.

The Carina Nebula is an immense cloud of gas and dust where a maelstrom of star birth and death is taking place. The nebula is located an estimated 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina the Keel. The nebula’s fantastic landscape is sculpted by the action of outflowing winds and scorching ultraviolet radiation from the monster stars that inhabit this inferno. In the process, these stars are shredding the surrounding material that is the last vestige of the giant cloud from which the stars were born.