14 DAY TRIAL // Astronomers at NASA have just released a new image of a beautiful cosmic structure in our galaxy. The object, dubbed NGC 3576, is a nebula located in the Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way, a few thousand light-years away from Eta Carinae.
The image was collected using the NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory and the 2.2-meter MPG/ESO Telescope, at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla installation, in Chile. The latter images the sky in visible and near infrared wavelengths. Two images were over-imposed to create this new view.
Located some 9,000 light-years from Earth, NGC 3576 is basically a giant cloud of glowing gas that hosts a significant number of forming stars. According to NASA experts, the diffuse X-ray patterns detected by Chandra are most likely produced by radiation surges from young, very massive stars.
These celestial objects are usually short-lived, since their tremendous mass tends to shorten their main sequence. Whereas stars such as the Sun can live for around 10 billion years, massive stars usually only last a few hundred million years.