Fact Sheet
Colorful Nursery
A "nursery" of hundreds of newborn stars sculpts and illuminates the remaining gas and dust in this recent view from the European Southern Observatory's New Technology Telescope in Chile. The nursery is known as M17, the Omega Nebula. It's about 5,500 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. It's one of the youngest stellar nurseries in the galaxy: None of its stars is more than one million years old, and more stars are continuing to take shape even today. [ESO]
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