Explanation:
A wonder of planet Earth's southern sky, star cluster
Trumpler
14 lies about nine thousand light-years away in the
Carina
complex -- a rich star forming region at the
edge of a giant molecular cloud.
This false-color x-ray
portrait
of Trumpler 14 from
the orbiting Chandra Observatory spans over 40 light-years and
reveals
stunning details of a cluster with one of the highest
concentrations of massive stars in the Galaxy.
Profoundly affecting their environment,
the hot cluster stars are themselves a mere one million years old.
Energetic winds from the stars have
cleared out a cavity in
the dense cloud, filling it with shock heated,
x-ray
emitting gas.
Still to come, the next few million years will see these stellar
prodigies rapidly exhaust their nuclear fuel and explode in violent
supernovae, flooding their cosmic neighborhood with
gas enriched in heavy elements.
