Take a Fantastic Flight Through a Stellar Creche

Celebrating 25 Years with Another Great Image

This is what you get when scientists peer into the heart of a starbirth region: lots of hot young stars, radiating ultraviolet light and blasting out strong winds that are eating away at the leftovers of their birth cloud. The still image of this is amazing, but when you let visualization experts loose on it, you get an amazing flythrough of a stellar créche.  The object Hubble Space Telescope observed is called Gum 28, which lies about 20,000 light-years away from us.

As we glide through the remains of the birth clouds, we’re aimed directly at a cluster of about 3,000 stars called Westerlund 2. They are about 2 million years old, which makes them toddlers compared to stars like our Sun, which is about 4.5 billion years old.

Put on some good space music and sail through the stars.