Dozens of stars glimmer like jewels in a jaw-dropping new photo by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The new Hubble image depicts the star cluster Trumpler 14, a collection of about 2,000 young stars that lies 8,000 light-years from Earth, near the center of the Carina Nebula. You can zoom in on the glittering star cluster in this stunning video showcasing the new images.
“This region of space houses one of the highest concentrations of massive, luminous stars in the entire Milky Way — a spectacular family of young, bright, white-blue stars,” European Space Agency (ESA) officials wrote in a escription of the photo, which was released today (Jan. 21). (Hubble is a joint mission involving NASA and ESA.)
“These stars are rapidly working their way through their vast supplies of hydrogen, and have only a few million years of life left before they meet a dramatic demise and explode as supernovae,” ESA officials added in the statement.
The Trumpler 14 cluster is just 500,000 years old, ESA officials said, so many of its stars will live fast and die young. Earth’s sun, by comparison, is still ticking along at the ripe old age of 4.6 billion years.
Click here to read more.
SOURCE: Christian Science Monitor, Mike Wall
BCNN1 WP 