Dust Pillar of the Carina Nebula.

Inside the head of this interstellar monster is a star that is slowly destroying it. The monster, on the right, is actually an inanimate pillar of gas and dust that measures over a light year in length. The star, not itself visible through the opaque dust , is bursting out partly by ejecting energetic beams of particles . Similar epic battles are being waged all over the star-forming Carina Nebula . The stars will win in the end, destroying their pillars of creation over the next 100,000 years, and resulting in a new open cluster of stars. The pink dots around the image are newly formed stars that have already been freed from their birth monster . The above image was released last week in commemoration of the Hubble Space Telescope s 20th year of operation. The technical name for the stellar jets are Herbig-Haro objects . How a star creates Herbig-Haro jet s is an ongoing topic of research , but it likely involves an accretion disk swirling around a central star. A second impressive Herbig-Haro jet occurs diagonally near the image center.