Star factory NGC 3603, as seen by the ESO Very Large Telescope.
3rd February 2010
Looking like a sky full of fireworks this striking image shows intense activity, a mammoth star nursery is constantly churning out new suns from a nebula’s vast resources of gas and dust. This breathtaking scene is located in the Carina arm of our own Galaxy some 22,000 light years away, and is one of the closest such starburst regions to us. This is NGC 3603 as seen by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. This image just released is dominated by a cluster, which is one of the brightest and densest balls of infant stars in the Galaxy. It contains thousands of stars similar in size to our Sun, and also many massive inhabitants including blue super-giants and Wolf-Rayet stars that crowd into a small space of less than 1 cubic light year.
The stars are born from the nebula and make it glow brightly with their powerful ultraviolet light, while their strong stellar winds work on clearing away the clouds of gas that surround them revealing glittering young suns. This is a picture showing different stages of stellar evolution, knots of gas that are about to ignite into infants, young stars, and stars close to death. This region of starburst holds a giant, a star that is 120 times more massive than the Sun and the most massive found so far in our Galaxy.