Gem Cluster, NGC 3293

The Gem Cluster, NGC 3293   Hot blue stars shine brightly in this beautiful, recently formed open cluster. Open cluster NGC 3293 is located in the constellation Carina, lies at a distance of about 8000 light years, and has a particularly high abundance of these young bright stars. A study of NGC 3293 implies that the blue/white stars are only about 6 million years old, whereas the cluster’s dimmer redder stars appear to be about 20 million years old. If true, star formation in this open cluster took at least 15 million years. Even this amount of time is short, however, when compared with the billions of years stars like our Sun live, and the over-ten billion year lifetimes of many galaxies.   NGC 3293 appears just in front of a dense dust lane and red glowing hydrogen and blue-green oxygen gas emanating from the Carina Nebula.This image was taken with a Planewave CDK24 telescope in Rio Hurtado Chile. The nebula is a narrowband image with hydrogen emission in red and oxygen emission in blue-green. The stars are true color RGB.