A “gem” of a young star cluster shines in Carina

Some of the Milky Way’s “celebrity stars” — opulent, attention-getting, and short-lived — can be found in this Hubble Space Telescope image of the glittering star cluster called Trumpler 14. It is only 500,000 years old, has one of the highest concentrations of massive, luminous stars in the entire Galaxy and is located 8,000 light-years away in the Carina Nebula.

The European Observatory’s VISTA telescope captured this remarkably detailed view of the spectacular Carina Nebula, showing the vast star-forming region in infrared light with countless suns blazing through thin clouds of gas and dust, including the gigantic Eta Carinae binary system.

Sometimes a brown dwarf is actually a planet — or planet-like anyway. A team of scientists in the United States and Canada have discovered that what astronomers had previously thought was one of the closest brown dwarfs to our own Sun is in fact a planetary mass object.