This Just In! Stars Bad for the Environment!

[Tuckerfan]

Their environment, anyway.

As they destroy the huge cloud that is their home, wildly energetic stars may be triggering the birth of the next generation. In a fabulous image released yesterday, these new stars are found sitting atop giant pillars of gas and dust.

The stellar nursery in this case is the Carina Nebula – a cloud of gas and dust that is 200 light-years in diameter. Located in the southern part of our galaxy, Carina is 10,000 light-years from Earth.

At the American Astronomical Society meeting here, Nathan Smith of the University of Colorado, Boulder, presented new data on this nebula from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

Spitzer’s infrared eyes can see through the dust that blocks much of the visible light, revealing the ruinous effects of massive stars in the cloud’s center.

“This is an image that illustrates how massive stars destroy the environment that they were born in,” Smith said at the press conference.