The heart of the Milky Way galaxy, where stars are packed like sardines and new stars are born in violent collisions between huge gas clouds, is normally shrouded from human eyes by 25,000 light-years of dust and obscuring stars. But Don Figer, an astronomer, recently used an infrared camera on the Hubble Space Telescope to view two clusters of very young, hot stars only 100 light-years from the galactic center. Astronomers say that the images may yield clues to how stars are formed.
Photos: QUINTUPLET CLUSTER -- At 4 million years, this thick cluster is older and more dispersed than the Arches. Many of its stars are on the verge of blowing up in supernova explosions. Among them is the brightest star in the galaxy, the so-called Pistol Star. ARCHES CLUSTER -- Containing 150 of the brightest known stars in the galaxy, the Arches Cluster is so tightly packed that 100,000 of its stars would fit into the space between the Sun and its nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years away. (Don Figer (Space Telescope Science Institute) and NASA)