The nearby galaxy Messier 33 contains a star-forming region called NGC 604 where some 200 hot, young, massive stars reside. The cool dust and warmer gas in this stellar nursery appear as the wispy structures in an optical image from the Hubble Space Telescope. In between these filaments are giant voids that are filled with hot, X-ray-emitting gas. Astronomers think these bubbles are being blown off the surfaces of the young and massive stars throughout NGC 604.
NGC 604 also likely contains an extreme member of the class of colliding-wind binaries, as reported in a recent paper. It is the first candidate source in this class to be discovered in M33 and the most distant example known, and shares several properties with the famous, volatile system called Eta Carinae, located in our galaxy.
Chandra’s X-ray data (blue) are combined in this image with optical data from Hubble (purple).
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/R. Tuellmann et al.; Optical: NASA/AURA/STScI/J. Schmidt
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