|
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a spectacular image of NGC 3603, a giant nebula hosting one of the most prominent massive young clusters in the Milky Way, thus supplying a prime template for star formation studies.
NGC 3603 is a prominent star-forming region located in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way, about 20,000 light-years away from our Solar System. This latest image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a young star cluster surrounded by a vast region of dust and gas.
. . . .The swirling nebula of NGC 3603 contains around 400,000 solar masses of gas. Lurking within this vast cloud are a few Bok globules (seen at the top right corner of the image), named after Bart Bok who first observed them in the 1940s. These are dark clouds of dense dust and gas with masses of about ten to fifty times larger than that of the Sun. They resemble insect cocoons and are undergoing gravitational collapse on their way to form new stars. Bok globules appear to be some of the coldest objects in the Universe.
|
