Cat's Paw Nebula Most Prolific, Experiencing a Baby Boom

While the Orion Nebula may be a favorite among skygazer, it’s far from the most prolific – an award that appears to belong to the Cat’s Paw Nebula, also known as the NGC 6334, which appears to be experiencing a baby boom.

"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," lead author Sarah Willis of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and Iowa State University said in a press release. "It might resemble a 'mini-starburst,' similar to a scaled-down version of the spectacular bursts sometimes seen in other galaxies."

A realm of extremes, the nebula contains an estimated 200,000 suns’ worth of material currently coalescing to form stars, some of which are 30 to 40 times the mass of the Sun, according to the study. Already, it is currently home to tens of thousands of recently-formed stars, some 2,000 of which are so young they are still trapped inside their dusty cocoons.

And while scientists have pinned down two processes known to trigger bursts of star formation, neither one are present in this case, making it a point of interest of astronomers everywhere.

Rapid star formation is often seen in luminous starburst galaxies, but they tend to be much farther from Earth. NGC 6334, on the other hand, is close enough that scientists are able to probe it in details down to counting the number of individual stars of various types and ages. As they do so, researchers hope to uncover another mystery: the processes that produce distant bursts capable of lighting up galaxies, making them bright enough to study.

"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. Here in NGC 6334, we can count the individual stars," explained co-author Howard Smith of the CfA.

According to the study, the starburst taking place in the Cat’s Paw began relatively recently, and will only last for a few million years – a blink of the eye in terms of the cosmos.

As it ages, researchers say the NGC 6334 will come to resmble the Pleiades star clusters, each filled with up to several thousand stars. Unfortunately for the inhabitants of the Earth when that occurs, however, it won’t look as impressive as the Pleiades when that it occurs due to the fact that it is nearly 10 times farther away at a distance of 5,500 light-years.