ESO Captures Stunning Image of Sibling Stars in Beautiful Cluster

ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile has captured a spectacular new image of a beautiful star cluster called NGC 3293. The new picture reveals a bit more about the lives and deaths of sibling stars in the constellation of Carina.

Star clusters like NGC 3293 contain stars that all formed at the same time out of the same cloud of gas and dust. This gives them the same chemical composition. As a result, clusters like this one are ideal for studying stellar evolution theory.

Most of the stars in the image are very young, and the cluster itself is less than 10 million years old. Open clusters like this one form from giant clouds of molecular gas. The stars themselves are held together by their mutual gravitational attraction. Yet this attraction isn't strong enough to hold a cluster together against close encounters with other clusters and clouds of gas. This means that open clusters will only last a few hundred million years, unlike globular clusters.

While there's still some evidence that suggests that there's still ongoing star formation in NGC 3293, it's thought that most of the 50 stars in this cluster were born in one single event. In addition, some of the stars look far older, despite them forming at the same time. This gives astronomers a natural laboratory to look at why stars evolve at different speeds.

In the image, you can see a bright orange star at the bottom of the cluster. Known as a red giant, this star has already used up the fuel at its core and is beginning to swell and cool. While red giants are reaching the end of their life cycle, the other stars in this cluster are in the middle period in their lives.

The image reveals a bit more about star evolution in this cluster in addition to star birth and death. This, in turn, may help scientists learn a bit more about clusters and stars in general.

Want to see more images taken with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope? You can check them out here.