This festively colorful nebula, called NGC 604, is one of the
A new Hubble Space Telescope photograph details a hotbed of star birth in a nearby galaxy. More than 200 bright blue stars -- young and scorching -- are visible in a cloud of glowing gas that is about 1,300 light-years across.
The region is called a nebula, and it is named NGC 604. It sits within a galaxy called M33.
The star birth region is one of the largest known, astronomers said. It's about 100 times bigger than the Orion Nebula, a well-known place of intense star formation in our own Milky Way Galaxy. The bright stars in NGC 604 are also, on average, younger than those in Orion. Many formed just 3 million years ago, researchers said.
Data for the photograph was collected in 1994, 1995, and 2001. The picture, released today, is a result of several exposures being combined. The scene is about 2.7 million light-years away.
Most of the young stars are clustered near the center of the nebula. They generate hot "winds" of charged particles that have carved a cavity in the region. The stars are massive, some of them packing 120 times the bulk of the Sun. Such stars die quickly, and their explosive ends contribute to the sculpting of the comparatively vacuous central area.
Ultraviolet radiation from the massive stars lights up the surrounding gas in the nebula.
-- Robert
Roy Britt
Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI),
D. Garnett (U. Arizona), J. Hester (ASU), and J. Westphal (Caltech)
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