Explanation:
Inside the head of this interstellar monster is a star that is slowly destroying it.
The monster, on the right, is actually an inanimate pillar of
gas and
dust that measures over a
light year in length.
The star, not itself visible through the
opaque dust,
is bursting out partly by ejecting
energetic beams of particles.
Similar epic battles are being waged all over the star-forming
Carina Nebula.
The stars will win in the end, destroying their
pillars of creation
over the next 100,000 years, and resulting in a new
open cluster of stars.
The pink dots around the image are newly formed stars that have already been freed from their birth
monster.
The
above image was released last week in commemoration of the
Hubble Space Telescopes 20th year of operation.
The technical name for the stellar jets are
Herbig-Haro objects.
How a star creates
Herbig-Haro jets is an ongoing
topic of research, but it likely involves an
accretion disk swirling around a central star.
A second impressive
Herbig-Haro jet occurs diagonally near the image center.
