Hubble snaps brilliant image of young star cluster inside NGC 3603

William Atkins
Wednesday, 03 October 2007 17:45

Science - Space

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced an image of a star cluster that contains stars with different masses but similar ages. The stars have evolved differently, making it easy for scientists to learn more about the various life-stages of stars from one location.         

NGC 3603 is a giant H II region of stars about 20,000 light-years away from the solar system. An H II region is a nebula (cloud) of hot gases and plasma where stars are beginning to form. NGC 3603 is thought to contain about 400,000 solar masses (enough mass to produce about 400,000 Suns).

Because of this strong activity of star formation, the cloud contains large amounts of ionized atomic hydrogen (molecular hydrogen gas: H2), which is why it is called an H II region. It is located within the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Within NGC 3603 is an open cluster of about 2,000 very bright and massive stars.

Such an image is important for astronomers because it helps them to determine, among other things, the distance to other galaxies, the chemical composition of such galaxies, and the birth and evolution of stars. Leading the study of NGC 3603 is astronomer Jesús Maíz Apellániz from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia, in Spain. The NGC 3603 nebula is especially important to Apellániz and others because it contains a very large, massive cluster of young stars—easily seen from Earth and studied for its wealth of information in star formation.

The Hubble image of NGC 3603 is found at the European Space Agency (ESA) website “Extreme star cluster in new Hubble images”.