Gassy Star ClusterLike a cosmic Little Miss Muffet, the young star cluster NGC 2100 is fated to sit alongside a "spider"—the colorful Tarantula nebula. As seen in a newly released picture from the European Southern Observatory's La Silla facility in Chile, the star cluster is surrounded by bright gas from the outer parts of the nebula.Found in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, NGC 2100 is what's called an open star cluster, because its hundreds of stars are only loosely bound by gravity and—after a few hundred million years—they'll eventually disperse.
Image courtesy ESO

Space Pictures This Week: Hidden Aurora, Mars Devil, More

Northern lights tint the clouds, an icy moon hangs out, a dust devil towers on Mars, and more in the week's best space pictures.

September 13, 2011