Dragon nest

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

A firestorm brews in this dragon nest. Whether you see a dragon ris­ing above or an amoeba with antenna in this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope, NGC 604 is one of the largest known areas of star birth. NGC 604 is a vast star cloud, larger than the Orion Neb­ula and con­tains stars only about 3 mil­lion years old. More than 200 bright blue stars lie within this glow­ing cloud of gas and dust.

NGC 604’s gas and dust clouds form a stel­lar nurs­ery, a place where new stars are born. As these dust clouds swirl and move around, eddies form. When enough gas and dust come together in one place, grav­ity causes the dust cloud to col­lapse on itself. Even­tu­ally, this dense area of gas begins to glow as fusion processes start and a star is born. The blue stars form­ing at heart of NGC 604 are hot and huge. The most mas­sive stars in NGC 604 are more than 120 times heav­ier than our Sun. Ultra­vi­o­let radi­a­tion flows out from these hot stars mak­ing the sur­round­ing neb­ula glow. Strong solar winds and super­nova have carved out the fan­ci­ful land­scape we see in the nebula.

At 1,300 light years across NGC 604 is nearly 100 times the size of the Orion Neb­ula. First noted by Eng­lish astronomer William Her­schel in 1784, NGC 604 lies in a spi­ral arm of the Tri­an­gu­lum Galaxy, or M33. As galax­ies go, M33 is right next door, only about 2.7 mil­lion light years away toward the small con­stel­la­tion Tri­an­gu­lum. The galaxy is part of what astronomers call the Local Group, that also includes the Milky Way, the Androm­eda Galaxy and the Mag­el­lanic Clouds.