James Webb Space Telescope Picture of The Month
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Aptly called the Treasure Chest, it takes us to a fantastical realm within our home galaxy - a veritable celestial sculpture garden.
This extraordinary cosmic scene is from the Carina Nebula, which lies just 7,500 light-years away and is home to an incredible collection of objects, including the Cosmic Cliffs revealed in the first-ever Webb image release.
The Carina Nebula is also humanity's nearest high-mass star-forming region - allowing astronomers the best opportunity to study the full range of star formation. This nebula houses some of the most massive stars in our galaxy as well as tens of thousands of protostars, offering a valuable opportunity to understand how stars shape their neighbourhoods.
This image, aptly called the Treasure Chest, is what’s known as a cometary globule: An isolated cloud of gas and dust with a dense, dark head and a sweeping tail. These clouds often somewhat resemble comets, but the Treasure Chest supposedly looks like a wooden chest with its lid wide open - but no gold lies within, just a compact cluster of young stars. These stars are responsible for the otherworldly glow coming from within the Treasure Chest. Over time, the brilliant starlight from these young stars will dissipate the surrounding cloud and reveal the entire cluster.
According to the European Space Agency, the key to the Treasure Chest’s sculptural shape lies outside this image: Eta Carinae. This is a star system containing at least two stars, one of which is 100 times as massive as the Sun. This star alone is about 5 million times as luminous as the Sun.
