NASA is releasing today a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) photograph of the most remarkable star forming region in the Local Group of Galaxies, 30 Doradus. The photograph shows about 60 stars within a central tight cluster in 30 Doradus. In contrast, earlier photographs with ground-based telescopes, supplemented by mathematical analysis, have shown only 27 stars in the tight cluster, which is called R136. Before the ground-based studies showed that so many stars are present in R136, some astronomers thought it was a single, supermassive object, with as much as 3,000 times the mass of the Sun. This... Read more