It shows a myriad of new stars bursting into existence in a cosmic catherine wheel of a spiral galaxy called Messier 83 (M83).
The galaxy is commonly known as the Southern Pinwheel among amateur astronomers and lies 15 million light-years away in the constellation of Hydra, the water snake.
The camera views the universe in a wide range of wavelengths, from ultraviolet to near-infrared, revealing stars at different stages of their life. It shows that the newest generations of stars are forming largely in clusters on the edges of dark lanes of dust in the spiral arms. Only a few million years old, these young stars stand out as bubbles of brightly glowing reddish hydrogen gas.
The young stars’ fierce winds of charged particles eventually blow away the gas, revealing bright blue star clusters aged from about one million to 10 million years. Older-still populations of stars are not as blue.
A bar of stars, gas, and dust can be seen slicing across the core of the galaxy and may be provoking most of the star birth in the galaxy’s core, say astronomers. Also visible are the remains of about 60 supernova blasts – five times more than were known to exist.
