A Section of the Carina Nebula (C92)

This sparkling new image depicts a small section of the Carina Nebula, one of the NASA Hubble Space Telescope’s most-imaged objects. To take this image of the Carina Nebula, scientists relied on Hubble’s infrared light imaging capabilities, which detect longer wavelengths of light not scattered by the heavy dust and gas surrounding the stars. This image shows only a small section of the nebula, located near the center in an area with thinner gas. Due to the nebula’s enormous size – about 300 light-years – astronomers can only study it in sections, piecing together the data from separate images to get an understanding of the nebula’s large-scale structure and composition.