This month marks the tenth anniversary of one of the best ideas to come out of modern astronomy: the Hubble Heritage project. Astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute knew that Hubble was taking fantastic images that the public weren’t seeing, because Hubble was taking them faster than they could release to the press. So they decided that on the first Thursday of each month they would release a gorgeous picture online.
For their tenth anniversary*, they present this beautiful image of detail in the nebula NGC 3324:
Cooool. But what is it?
It’s a cavity several light years across, carved out by the fierce light and intense stellar winds from a group of young, massive, hot stars that are out of the frame ("up", if you will). This whole part of the sky, in the direction of Carina, is lousy with dust and gas. There are star-forming regions all ...
