Light from powerful stellar eruption illuminating canyons of dust

These images reveal light from a massive stellar outburst in the Carina Nebula
reflecting off dust clouds surrounding a behemoth double-star system, a phenomenon
called a light echo.

The color image at left shows the Carina Nebula, a star-forming region
located 7500 light-years from Earth. The massive star Eta Carinae resides near the
top of the image. The double-star system, about 120 times more massive than the
Sun, produced a spectacular outburst that was seen on Earth from 1837 to 1858. But
some of the light from the eruption took an indirect path and is just now reaching
our planet. The light bounced off dust clouds (the box about 100 light-years away
at the bottom of the image) and was rerouted to Earth. The image was taken by the
U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory’s Curtis-Schmidt Telescope at the
Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile.

The three black-and-white images at right show light from the eruption illuminating
the dust clouds over an eight-year span as it moves through them. The effect is like
shining a flashlight on different regions of a vast cavern. The images were taken by
the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory’s Blanco 4-meter telescope at the
CTIO.