A cluster of some of the brightest stars in our galaxy glitter in this new Hubble image
The Hubble Space Telescope returned this incredible image of a cluster of some of the brightest stars in our galaxy.
The blue-white stars are so bright they look like a field of cosmic diamonds. That little smudge near the center is silhouette of a clump of gas and dust:
This cluster of stars is called Trumpler 14 and it's about 8,000 light-years away from us in the Carina Nebula.
The stars in Trumpler 14 are only a few hundred thousand years old (our own sun is billions of years old), but the young stars are burning through their cores of hydrogen fuel so quickly that most will explode as supernovas in the next few million years.
They're also releasing bursts of high-speed particles from their surface which get swept up into stellar winds. These winds collide with other cosmic material and created super-hot shock waves that heat surrounding gas clouds to millions of degrees.
The blasts from the exploding stars and stellar winds will carve out pockets inside clouds of gas and dust that will give birth to a new cluster of stars - part of a continuous cycle of star birth and death.