Creator of Stars

Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hub­ble Her­itage Team (STScI/AURA)

A great open mouth appears to swal­low stars in this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope. Instead, this vast cloud of glow­ing hydro­gen is a giant cre­ator of stars; a neb­ula where stars are born.

Explore the flower-like petals of gas and the bright blue stars of NGC 604. What other shapes do you see in this stun­ning image? NGC 604, a bil­low­ing cloud of gas in the Tri­an­gu­lum Galaxy, spans about 1,500 light-years. If we hopped in our star­ship for a tour across this immense neb­ula, our jour­ney across would take more than 1,500 years at the speed of light. Sim­i­lar to the famous and much closer Orion Neb­ula, NGC 604 con­tains pock­ets of gas and dust that are col­laps­ing under grav­ity. Even­tu­ally, these clouds may coa­lesce enough to begin glow­ing on its own and become a star. Once these stars form how­ever, intense ultra­vi­o­let radi­a­tion and strong solar winds from the new star, pushes away the sur­round­ing gas and caus­ing it to glow red. The solar winds also carve out and erode pil­lars, cav­erns and bub­bles within the cloud.

NGC 604 is one of the largest and bright­est con­cen­tra­tions of ion­ized hydro­gen in our local group of galax­ies. The Tri­an­gu­lum Galaxy and NGC 604 lie about 2.7 mil­lion light-years from Earth. They are close cos­mic neigh­bors to our Milky Way Galaxy.