Astronomy Cast: Carina Constellation

This constellation used to actually be part of a much, much larger constellation called Argo Navis, that, if it still existed, would be by far the largest constellation in the sky, and would dwarf absolutely everything else, but because it’s so large, it’s a little bit unwieldy to use for astronomical purposes, so it got broken up into three different constellations. It got broken up into Carina, Puppis, and into Vela, and each of these different parts represents a different part of the ship, where Carina is the keel, and Puppis is the poop deck, and Vela is the sails, so between all three of these you have the ship from Jason and the Argonauts. It just kinda looks like this random shape of stars on the sky. It’s not one of those constellations like, well, this is where Orion does when Orion…you can actually see – it’s a dude in the sky with a sword. Carina, no, it’s just miscellaneous shape of stars.Normally the brightest star in the constellation is Alpha+ the constellation name, so you’d expect “Alpha Carina” to be the brightest star in the constellation and if its not, it’s going to be hard to tell it apart from the star that actually is the brightest star in the constellation by eye. So Carina’s actually a bigger system. They’re very similar in age actually. They both have ongoing star-formation going on. The difference is when you look through Orion, you don’t see as many rich, open clusters as you see with Carina. So there we start to imagine things like the Hyades cluster here in the Northern Hemisphere. This is an open cluster that has had time to spread itself out as it orbits around and around the Milky Way, except this is that system times eight because there are so many open clusters embedded within the Carina Nebula. Now, what’s going to be amazing, though, is the process to get there.