Hubble finds a celestial Monster Mash - CNET

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Some 170,000 light-years away in the constellation of Dorado, deep in the heart of the Tarantula Nebula, is a cluster of very young, very bright stars. The R136 cluster, as it is rather unromantically known, has an unusually high rate of star formation.

It's so bright that it produces the majority of the energy that makes the Tarantula Nebula, around 1,900 light-years across, visible from Earth.

The energy these stars emit, however, is mostly in the ultraviolet spectrum. So an inteational team of scientists led by Paul Crowther at the University of Sheffield in the UK used the ultraviolet spatial resolution capability of the Hubble Space Telescope's Imaging Spectrograph to take a closer look.

"The ability to distinguish ultraviolet light from such an exceptionally crowded region into its component parts, resolving the signatures of individual stars, was only made possible with the instruments aboard Hubble," Crowther said in a statement.

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What the scientists found was extraordinary. Inside the cluster are dozens of stars over 50 times the mass of the sun, and nine enormous monsters over 100 times the mass of the sun. And it's not all just mass, either: Together, the stars are 30 million times brighter than the sun.