Credit: Michael Rich, Kenneth Mighell, and James D. Neill (Columbia University), Wendy Freedman (OCIW) and NASA/ESA

We believe our HST observations of NGC 4038/4039 and other merger galaxies also shed some new light on how young globular clusters form, i.e., from giant clouds of hydrogen gas that astronomers call Giant Molecular Clouds. Full-grown spiral galaxies like the Milky Way have typically 1000-2000 such clouds. An example is the GMC associated with the Eagle Nebula.

Provider: Hubble Space Telescope | ESA

Image Source: https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo9734t/

Curator: ESA/Hubble, Garching bei München, Germany

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License