The Gemini South Telescope gave this view of the western wall of the Carina Nebula thanks to adaptive icons.
International Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA
The birth of stars is a gaseous and dusty affair, but it is also visually gorgeous. The new image of Chile’s Gemini Southern Telescope brings the stellar nursery of the Carina Nebula to surprisingly intense attention.
Astronomers are looking at the nebula of the Carina to learn more about the formation of stars. The image, released Monday, shows a complex dance of glowing gas and dust in the “Western Wall” along the edge of the nebula.
The secret sauce is the telescope’s adaptive optics. Noirlab of the National Science Foundation said in a statement on Monday that “adaptive optics compensates for the disordering effect of producing pin-sharp images in the Earth’s atmosphere, which is comparable to a space telescope.” Noirlab runs the Gemini Observatory.
By observing Nihar in infrared light, we have been able to see “the sharpest perspective to date” of how huge young stars affect the area around them and how the formation of the star and the planet moves forward.
The team behind the image, led by Rice University astronomers, published a paper about the achievement in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on Monday. Lead author Patrick Hartig called the results “spectacular.”
Gemini’s image gives a taste of what can be expected from the next generation of space telescopes. NASA’s late James Webb.
“Structures like the Western Wall will be a rich hunting ground for both web and ground-based telescopes with adaptive optics like the Gemini South,” Hartigan said in a Rice statement. “Each will pierce the dust buds and reveal new information about the birth of the stars.”
