Stellar nurseries

It's not so much news as an excuse to post some pretty images. But NASA's doing a little retrospective on the occasion of Hubble's 15th year in service, so I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon too.

Picked the M16 image to the left out of the bunch thinking less of its beauty (in that department, I'd call the Centaurus A collision the winner) than of what it means: stars being born.

Think about that, for a moment or two. Whatever happens to our species over the next few centuries and (if we're lucky) millennia over here in this corner of the Orion arm, 7,000 light years farther in toward the centre of our galaxy, in the border of the Sagittarius-Carina arm, we're watching stars being born... Something which might lead just about anywhere—even, potentially, given a few billion years more, to another sentient species, looking up and around, pointing telescopes out this way...

Depending, of course, on how long it takes them, they might by then just find themselves looking at a cooling white dwarf where our sun once shone. But either way, somehow, I find the thought somewhat cheering.