Baby Stars Are Eating This Galaxy’s Gas Too Fast To Last: Life And Death In A Starburst

Galaxy NGC 4536 is going out with a burst — a starburst.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured a photo of galaxy NGC 4536 in the Virgo constellation, which the space agency is calling “a hub of extreme star formation.”

A starburst galaxy is not a new type of candy. NASA defines it as a galaxy where so many new stars are being born so quickly that they are using up the local fuel source faster than that galactic gas can be filled back up.

NGC 4536 is about 50 million light-years away from Earth, so we cannot see what it looks like today — light from the galaxy takes too long to reach our eyeballs. But NASA says the baby stars in a starburst galaxy, being raised under such extreme conditions, often “die young, burning extremely hot and exhausting their gas supplies fairly quickly.”

Read: What Killed This Massive Young Galaxy?

Still, they give astronomers insight into how galaxies grow and evolve, so they won’t die for nothing.

It’s not just starburst galaxies that give birth to new stars. Scientists have observed stars forming under a variety of conditions, including when supermassive black holes pass gas. As those enormous black holes consume everything in their path, they let out a gaseous wind that could become a nursery for stars.

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