NGC 604: Giant Stellar
Nursery
Stars are sometimes born in the midst of chaos. About 3 million years ago in the nearby galaxy M33, a large cloud of gas spawned dense internal knots which gravitationally collapsed to form stars.
NGC 604 was so
large, however, it could form enough stars to make a globular cluster.
Many young stars from this
cloud are visible in
the above
image from the Hubble
Space Telescope, along with what is left of the initial gas cloud.
Some stars were so
massive they have already evolved and exploded in a supernova. The brightest stars that
are left emit light so energetic that they create one of the largest cloud ofionized hydrogen gas
known, comparable to the Tarantula
Nebula in our Milky Way's
close neighbor, the Large
Magellanic Cloud.
Image Credit: Hubble Legacy
Archive, ESA, NASA; Processing - Donald Waid