Hubble Showcases Star Birth in M83, the Southern Pinwheel

The magnificent spiral galaxy M83 lies 15 million light-years away in the southern sky. Peering into one of the galaxy's spiral arms, the Hubble Space Telescope's new Wide Field Camera 3 is giving astronomers a detailed new look at the firestorm of star birth taking place in the galaxy. Stars are born in huge reddish nebulae and emerge as brilliant blue star clusters.

Nicknamed the Southern Pinwheel, M83 is undergoing more rapid star formation than our own Milky Way galaxy, especially in its nucleus. The sharp "eye" of the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) has captured hundreds of young star clusters, ancient swarms of globular star clusters, and hundreds of thousands of individual stars, mostly blue supergiants and red supergiants. The image, taken in August 2009, is Hubble's close-up view of the myriad stars near the galaxy's core, the bright whitish region at far right.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon and M. Estacion (STScI)

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and if you listen closely, you can hear Midnight City playing in the background