Gone in the blink of an eye… …on a cosmic scale, that is. This sparkly galaxy (swipe to see the full view) is home to an unusually high number of extremely hot and massive stars that seem to be on a mission to shed surplus mass as quickly as possible. These intense, brilliant stars, known as Wolf-Rayet stars, can be around 20 times as massive as the Sun, but they don’t last long on a cosmic timescale. A Wolf-Rayet star can burn up its fuel and blast its bulk out into the universe in only a few hundred thousand years. A typical star of this kind can lose a mass equal to that of our Sun in just 100,000 years! Though many of the brightest and most massive stars in the Milky Way are Wolf-Rayet stars, it is unusual to find more than a few of these stars per galaxy – except in galaxies like the one in this image. These massive stars are also incredibly hot, with surface temperatures some 10 to 40 times that of the Sun, and very luminous, glowing at tens of thousands to several million ti...