Hubble Space Telescope

Giant Starbirth Region In Neighboring Galaxy This is a Hubble Space Telescope image (right) of a vast nebula called NGC 604, which lies in the neighboring spiral galaxy M33, located 2.7 million light-years away in the constellation Triangulum. It's like Orion nebula of our Galaxy, but this one is particularly large, nearly 1,500 light-years across. At the heart of NGC 604 are over 200 hot stars, much more massive than our Sun (15 to 60 solar masses). They heat the gaseous walls of the nebula (17,000 degrees Fahrenheit, 10,000 degrees Kelvin) making the gas fluoresce.

• Giant Starbirth Region in Neighboring Galaxy
  Hui Yang (Univ of Illinois, Jeff Hester (Arizona State University) and NASA (August 7, 1996)

Bright Starbirth Region in a Dim Galaxy Clusters of stars and a fishhook-shaped cloud of luminescent gases glow brilliantly in NGC 2363, a giant star-forming region in the Magellanic galaxy NGC 2366 The brightest star visible on this image (at the tip of the fishhook) is of the same class of Eta-Carinae: an erupting Luminous Blue Variable (LBV). This monstrous star (30 to 60 times as massive as the Sun) is in a very unstable, eruptive phase of its life. The LBV was discovered in Hubble pictures taken in January 1996. This Hubble image also shows two dense clusters of massive stars. Stellar "winds" and supernova blasts have blown the gas away from the oldest cluster (4-5 million years old) seen at the top of the image. This has created a cavity in the nebula. The brightest cluster (bottom center) is probably less than 2 million years old and still embedded in remnants of gas and dust out of which it condensed.

• Laurent Drissen, Jean-Rene Roy and Carmelle Robert (Université Laval), Yvan Dutil/ CFHT and NASA.
  October 11, 1996:
• Bright Starbirth Region in a Dim Galaxy