Carina

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Discovering the X-ray treasures in Chandra’s archives

16 October 2016 Astronomy Now

Each year, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory helps celebrate American Archive Month by releasing a collection of images using X-ray data. Each of these six new images — representing just a small fraction of the treasures that reside in Chandra’s unique archive — also includes data from telescopes covering other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, such as visible and infrared light.

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Hubble’s blue bubble in Carina

22 February 2016 Astronomy Now

At the centre of this beautiful NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is a Wolf–Rayet star known as WR 31a, located about 30,000 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina. The distinctive blue bubble is a Wolf–Rayet nebula — an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other gases expanding at a rate of around 137,000 miles per hour.