NASA has released a stunning Hubble mosaic of the spiral galaxy M83 or Southern Pinwheel. The electrifying magentas and blues show the galaxy is afire with star development. The galaxy is positioned 15 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra.

The Hubble mosaic reveals thousands of stars clusters, hundreds of thousands of individual stars, as well as supernova remnants. According to NASA, you are seeing the “drama of stellar birth and death” spread across many light-years.

The newest generations of stars are developing primarily in groups on the edges of the dark spiral dust lanes. These luminous young stellar clusters generate large quantities of ultraviolet light that is absorbed by encircling spread out gas clouds, causing them to glow in pinkish hydrogen light.

Slowly, the intense stellar winds from the youngest, most massive stars clear out the gas, unveiling luminous blue star groups and giving a “Swiss Cheese” appearance to the spiral arms. These youngest star groups are approximately one to 10 million years old. The populations of stars up to 100 million years or older look yellow or orange by comparison because the young blue stars have already burned out.

Interstellar “bubbles” generated by almost 300 supernovas from massive stars have been discovered in this Hubble mosaic. By examining these “ghosts” of dead stars, astronomers obtain a new window into the nature of the stars that exploded and scattered nuclear processed chemical elements back into the galaxy, adding to the next generation of new stars.

According to the space agency, the Hubble mosaic is being utilized to support a citizen science project called STAR DATE: M83. The main goal is to approximate ages for about 3,000 star clusters. You can read more about the citizen science project here.