The bright knot at right of centre holds Pismis 24, a cluster containing some of the most massive stars known: the heaviest is somewhere around 75 to 100 times the Sun. Stars that big live fast, spend a few million years at most, then die as supernovae. Everything glowing here is gas responding to their radiation, hollowed and shredded into the shells and streamers you can trace across the frame. The nickname War and Peace came from an infrared survey, where different parts of the cloud looked to observers like a skull on one side and a dove on the other; in visible light, as here, neither shape survives. About 5,500 light-years away in Scorpius, sharing the neighbourhood with the Cat’s Paw.
