The Carina Nebula around WR 22
This spectacular image from ESO shows the brilliant and unusual star Wolf-Rayet 22, colorful folds of the Carina Nebula. WR 22 is one of many hot and brilliant stars contained by the beautiful Carina Nebula (NGC 3372), a huge region of star formation in the southern Milky Way.
Wolf–Rayet stars are named after the two French astronomers who first identified them in the mid-nineteenth century, and WR 22 is one of the most massive ones we know of. It is a member of a double star system and has been measured to have a mass at least 70 times that of the Sun. Although the star lies over 5000 light-years from the Earth, it is so bright that it can just be faintly seen with the unaided eye under good conditions. Read more
Ant Nebula
Mz 3 (Menzel 3) is a young bipolar planetary nebula in the constellation Norma that is composed of a bright core and four distinct high-velocity outflows that have been named lobes, columns, rays, and chakram. These nebulosities are described as: two spherical bipolar lobes, two outer large filamentary hour-glass shaped columns, two cone shaped rays, and a planar radially expanding, elliptically shaped chakram. Mz 3 is a complex system composed of three nested pairs of bipolar lobes and an equatorial ellipse. Its lobes all share the same axis of symmetry but each have very different morphologies and opening angles. Read more
