NGC 3603 And NGC 3576: A Spectacular Landscape Of Star Formation
A new captured by the Wide Field Imager at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile shows two dramatic star formation regions in the southern Milky Way. On the left is the star cluster NGC 3603, located 20,000 light-years away in the Carina–Sagittarius spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. On the right, about half as far from Earth, is a collection of glowing gas clouds known as NGC 3576.Both were discovered by English astronomer John Herschel in 1834, during his three-year expedition to systematically survey the southern skies from near Cape Town. He described NGC 3603 as a remarkable object and thought that it might be a globular star cluster. Future studies showed that it is not an old globular, but a young open cluster, one of the richest known. read more