NGC 3603

The ESO has released a striking new image of the star nursery closest to Earth

Most stars are between 1 and 10 billion years old. Our Sun is middle-aged, around 4.6 billion years old.

But about 22,000 light-years away, in the Carina constellation located on one of the spiral arms of our own Milky Way galaxy, lies an extremely active stellar nursery, where baby suns are constantly being born.

It is known as NGC 3603, an open cluster of stars much younger than our Sun: Each is around just 1 million years old. It is the closest region of its kind to our solar system.

Now, the European Space Organization (ESO) has released a stunning new image of this busy cosmic factory, taken by their Very Large Telescope (VLT). Located in Paranal, Chile, the VLT is not only the world’s largest optical telescope array, but also the most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory.

According to the ESO press release, the relatively close distance of NGC 3603 is key in "providing astronomers with a local test bed for studying intense star formation processes, very common in other galaxies, but hard to observe in detail because of their great distance from us."

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image: ESO