A new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows a cloud of newborn stars in infrared light.

The nebula, called DR 6, is in the main plane of our Milky Way galaxy. It contains a cluster of about 10 massive newborn stars, ranging from 10 to 20 times the mass of our Sun.

Upon release of the picture last week, astronomers playfully described it as looking like some sort of freakish space face. The cavity-like regions, which do look like ghoulish eyes, were carved out by intense heat and winds, which shoot outward from the stars (located in the central bright bar).

The green material remaining in the eyes and mouth is comprised of gas, while the red regions and tendrils beyond make up the dusty cloud that originally gave birth to the young stars.

Within the nebula's nose, a second generation of stars is in the process of forming. These stars, in turn, will sculpt their stellar nursery, and ultimately affect the birth of yet another generation of stars. Spitzer provides astronomers with an unprecedented combination of sensitivity and spatial resolution to study this cycle in detail.

DR 6 is located 3,900 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. The distance from one end of its central bar to the other is the about 3.5 light-years, or about the same distance from our Sun to its nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri.

-- SPACE.com Staff

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/S.Carey (Caltech) & T.Greicius (JPL)