Infant stars in a nearby galaxy show themselves to be far more capable than human children of cleaning up after themselves.

Maoz, who led a team that produced the images, said this cleansing process is understood, but not in detail. This is partly due to the fact that the most highly populated and energetic star clusters are outside our own galaxy.

"It is much better to study super star clusters in starburst galaxies, or galaxies like NGC 1512 with a starburst ring, where there can be hundreds of clusters," Maoz said. NGC 1512 is 30 million light-years away.

The research might help astronomers interpret similar observations of more distant galaxies, which are faint and therefore do not allow for such detailed images. Understanding starbirth in distant galaxies would provide a window to star formation when the universe was young.

"It is remarkable how similar the properties of this starburst are to those of other nearby starbursts that have been studied in detail with Hubble," said Aaron Barth, a Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researcher who also worked on creating the image.

The results will be published in the June issue of the Astronomical Journal.

NGC 1512 is known as a barred spiral galaxy, because of its rotating arms and a central bar loaded with matter (the bar is not visible in the new images). The giant bar in NGC 1512 is thought to funnel gas into the starburst ring.

The galaxy sits in the southern constellation of Horologium. It spans 70,000 light-years, nearly as much as our own Milky Way Galaxy, and is bright enough to be seen with amateur telescopes.

The new composite image was created from images taken with three different Hubble cameras, the Faint Object Camera (FOC), the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). The images were created in 1993, 1998 and 1999.

Hubble is operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute for NASA and the European Space Agency.