Dragon Jewels

Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hub­ble Her­itage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

A dragon swoops in to pro­tect its jew­els in this image of NGC 3603. Thou­sands of sparkling new stars form one of the most mas­sive star clus­ters in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Explore this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope. What other sto­ries can you cre­ate? The jewel box nes­tles within a glow­ing cloud of gas and dust; the orig­i­nal mate­r­ial from which the clus­ter was made. Fierce winds from the hot, blue suns have dri­ven back the dust cloud form­ing fan­tas­tic shapes and land­scapes of pil­lars and swirls. The star clus­ter is one of the most densely packed clus­ters known to astronomers. Some of the stars toward the cen­ter of the clus­ter are blue giants, with a mass much greater than our Sun. These mon­ster stars burn out quickly, liv­ing only a few mil­lion years before explod­ing in a super­nova. Also, find Bok glob­ules within the cloud. These inky, black globs of dust may even­tu­ally col­lapse to form new stars.

NGC 3603 is found about 20,000 light-years away in a star-forming region of the Carina spi­ral arm of the Milky Way. The neb­ula was dis­cov­ered by John Fred­er­ick William Her­schel in 1834.