Hunting Massive Stars with Herschel  Churning Out Stars W3 is an
enormous stellar nursery about 6,200 light-years away in the
Perseus Arm, one of the Milky Way galaxy's main spiral arms,
which hosts both low- and high-mass star formation. In this
image from the Herschel space observatory, the low-mass forming
stars are seen as tiny yellow dots embedded in cool red
filaments, while the highest-mass stars -- with greater than
eight times the mass of our sun -- emit intense radiation,
heating up the gas and dust around them and appearing here in
blue. Image credits: ESA/PACS & SPIRE consortia, A. Rivera-
Ingraham & P.G. Martin, Univ. Toronto, HOBYS Key Programme (F.
Motte) › Full image and caption   • submit to reddit  March 28,
2013  In this new view of a vast star-forming cloud called W3,
the Herschel space observatory tells the story of how massive
stars are born. Herschel is a European Space Agency mission with
important NASA contributions.  W3 is a giant gas cloud
containing an enormous stellar nursery, some