Star Cluster Bursts into Life in New Hubble Image

Thousands of sparkling young stars are nestled within the giant nebula NGC 3603. This stellar "jewel box" is one of the most massive young star clusters in the Milky Way Galaxy. NGC 3603 is a prominent star-forming region in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way, about 20,000 light-years away. This latest image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows a young star cluster surrounded by a vast region of dust and gas. The image reveals stages in the life cycle of stars.

Hubble's Greatest Discoveries

Galaxy Evolution
Hubble has peered across space and time to study galaxies in an infant universe. The most famous of Hubble's faraway views is the Hubble Deep Field, a tiny speck of sky that revealed a zoo of about 3,000 galaxies, some as old as 10 billion years. The Hubble Deep Field, taken in 1995, has become one of the most studied regions of the sky and has been examined in a wide range of wavelengths, from radio to infrared.
Hubble's observations of deep space indicate that the young cosmos was filled with much smaller and more irregularly shaped galaxies than those that astronomers see in our nearby universe. These smaller structures, composed of gas and young stars, may be the building blocks from which the more familiar spiral and elliptical galaxies formed, possibly through processes such as multiple galaxy collisions and mergers.