Star Factory

Thousands of individual stars and a diffuse cloud of hot gas fill this X-ray image of the Carina Nebula, a stellar nursery about 7,500 light-years from Earth, from the space-based Chandra observatory. The lowest-energy X-rays, which correspond to the lowest temperatures, are in red, while the highest-energy X-rays are in blue. The nebula, which is visible from the southern hemisphere, has given birth to more than 10,000 stars, the most massive of which have already exploded as supernovae. Other stars in the nebula, which is still giving birth to new stars, will suffer the same fate. [NASA/CXC/PSU/L.Townsley et al.]