When astronomers want to look at all the stages of star birth and star death in the Milky Way galaxy, they often turn their gaze to the mighty Carina Nebula, in the heart of the constellation Carina. It’s often referred to as the Keyhole Nebula due to its keyhole-shaped central region. By all standards, this emission nebula (so-called because it emits light) is one of the largest that can be observed from Earth, dwarfing the Orion Nebula in the constellation Orion. This vast region of molecular gas is not well-known to observers in the northern hemisphere since it’s a southern skies object. It lies against the backdrop of our galaxy and almost seems to blend in with that band of light that stretches across the sky.

Since its discovery, this giant cloud of gas and dust has fascinated astronomers. It provides them a one-stop location to study the processes that form, shape, and ultimately destroy stars in our galaxy.

The Carina Nebula (in the Southern Hemisphere sky)

The Carina nebula is part of the Carina-Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way. Our galaxy is in the shape of a spiral, with a set of spiral arms arcing around a central core. Each set of arms has a specific name.

The distance to the Carina Nebula is somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 light-years away from us. It’s very extensive, stretching across some 230 light-years of space and is quite a busy place. Within its boundaries are dark clouds where newborn stars are forming, clusters of hot young stars, old dying stars, and the remnants of stellar behemoths that have already blown up as supernovae. Its most famous object is the luminous blue variable star Eta Carinae.

The Carina Nebula was discovered by the astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in 1752. He first observed it from South Africa. Since that time, the expansive nebula has been studied intensely by both ground-based and space-based telescopes. Its regions of star birth and star death are tempting targets for Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and many others.