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(Image credit: ESO/T. Preibisch)

ESO’s Very Large Telescope has delivered the most detailed infrared image of the Carina Nebula stellar nursery taken so far. Many previously hidden features, scattered across a spectacular celestial landscape of gas, dust and young stars, have emerged. This is one of the most dramatic images ever created by the VLT.

Deep in the heart of the southern Milky Way lies a stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula. It is about 7500 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Carina (The Keel). This cloud of glowing gas and dust is one of the closest incubators of very massive stars to the Earth and includes several of the brightest and heaviest stars known. One of them, the mysterious and highly unstable star Eta Carinae, was the second brightest star in the entire night sky for several years in the 1840s and is likely to explode as a supernova in the near future, by astronomical standards. The Carina Nebula is a perfect laboratory for astronomers studying the violent births and early lives of stars.

Hundreds of individual images have been combined to create this picture, which is the most detailed infrared mosaic of the nebula ever taken and one of the most dramatic images ever created by the VLT. It shows not just the brilliant massive stars, but hundreds of thousands of much fainter stars that were previously invisible

You can access more stunning images of nebulae, produced by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) on the National STEM Centre eLibrary.

Another resource that you may find useful is:
TRUMP Part 3: Star Formation and Evolution
This part of the TRUMP Astrophysics resource package deals with the formation, evolution and 'death' of stars. Like all other parts of the TRUMP package, this part contains study notes (self-study material for teachers), teaching notes and photocopiable student sheets.