Astronomers say dramatic nebula having a 'baby boom' of stars

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 5 (UPI) -- U.S. astronomers say a dramatic stellar nursery called the Cat's Paw Nebula, also known as NGC 6334, is experiencing a "baby boom."

Its activity outshines that of the familiar Orion Nebula, one of the closest stellar nurseries to Earth, they said.

"NGC 6334 is forming stars at a more rapid pace than Orion -- so rapidly that it appears to be undergoing what might be called a burst of star formation," study lead author Sarah Willis of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Iowa State University said. "It might resemble a 'mini-starburst,' similar to a scaled-down version of the spectacular bursts sometimes seen in other galaxies."

The Cat's Paw Nebula contains about 200,000 suns' worth of material that is coalescing to form new stars, some with up to 30 to 40 times as much mass as our sun.

Within the nebula are tens of thousands of recently formed stars, more than 2,000 of which are extremely young and still trapped inside their dusty cocoons, the astronomers said.

Because NGC 6334 is relatively nearby at 5,500 light years away astronomers can probe it in much greater detail, even down to observing individual stars of various types and ages.

"Young galaxies in the early universe are small smudges of light in our telescopes, and we can only study the collective processes over the whole galaxy," Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer Howard Smith said. "Here in NGC 6334, we can count the individual stars."