Stars are often created alongside a number of "siblings," and the view can be spectacular.
The "litter" of stars are born from a "single cloud of gas and dust," a European Southern Observatory news release reported.
"Stars born inside a cluster may be siblings, but they are not twins. They have almost the same age, but differ in size, mass, temperature, and [color]. The course of a star's life is determined largely by its mass, so a given cluster will contain stars in various stages of their lives, giving astronomers a perfect laboratory in which they can study how stars evolve," the news release reported.
The stars only stay together for a stellar minute (up to hundreds of millions of years) before gravity forces them apart.
Researchers recently photographed one of these clusters, called NGC 3572, which is located in the Carina (Keel) constellation.
The cluster is full of blazing bright blue stars. The white-hot stars create stellar winds that break up the dust and gas cloud that the stars were born in.
"The glowing gas clouds and accompanying cluster of stars are the subjects of a new picture from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile," the news release reported.
The cloud that gave birth to the stars can be seen in the bottom part of the image although it looks fairly different than it did initially. Radiation from the stars have drastically moved the cloud and changed its shape. The radiation is what causes the bright red glow, and can mold the cloud into shapes such as "bubbles, arcs and the dark columns that astronomers call elephant trunks."
Another interesting detail of the image is a "tiny ring-like nebula" located right above the image's center. Researchers are unsure of how this nebula came to be. It could be made of leftover material from the blown-away cloud, or a bubble that formed from the heat of a baby star. Others believe it could be a planetary nebula, which is formed from the remains of a dying star.
