Make your mom feel out-of-this-world this #MothersDay by sending her this interstellar rose, courtesy of our Spitzer Space Telescope. Bright young stars fill this rosebud-shaped cloud of gas & dust, known as a nebula. A recent census of the cluster reveals the presence of 130 young stars. The stars formed from a massive cloud of gas and dust that contains enough raw materials to create a thousand Sun-like stars. In a process that astronomers still poorly understand, fragments of this molecular cloud became so cold and dense that they collapsed into stars. Most stars in our Milky Way galaxy are thought to form in such clusters. Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech-Harvard-Smithsonian CfA #nasa #space #spitzer #telescope #mother #mothersday #mom #science #solarsystem #universe #pictureoftheday #rose #rosebud #flower #beautiful #nebula #star #gas #dust