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Highlights The Deep Mystery of Space Starbirth in M33 Filter your Future: View All Posts   Origins View All Posts Starbirth in M33 Jun 29, 2006 // // Origins Starbirth in M33 Even in ordinary galaxies which are not undergoing a starburst these are likely to be regions in which there is a great deal of star-forming activity. One of these regions, a nebula known as NGC 604, is pictured here in an image from the HST. NGC 604 lies in the outer regions of the disk of an ordinary spiral galaxy (very similar to the Milky Way) called M33. M33 is just 2.7 million light years away from us, in the direction of the constellation Trangulum. There are at least 200 hot young stars at the heart of NGC 604, each of them with a mass between twenty-five to sixty times the mass of our Sun, plus (it is assumed) many smaller stars. The energy from these stars is absorbed by the gas in the nebula, which glows as the energy it has absorbed is radiated. This image strikingly reveals the three-dimensional structure of the nebula, with cavernous holes in the cloud made by the pressure of the energy being radiated by the stars inside it, pushing the material away into space. Eventually, the cloud will disperse and the stars will settle down as an open cluster. View the Most Recent Blog Entries About • Religion and Space Other Futures: * Roy Scarfo • SpaceMatters