The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has discovered an unusual amount of stars being formed in an area of the constellation Ursa Major (the Big Bear), about 60 million light years away.

The HST’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 revealed several hundred star clusters containing up to a million stars each. Their colors and magnitudes indicate they are 1 million to 100 million years old, which is very young for stars.

Astronomers believe that something very dramatic must have occurred to trigger a wave of new star formation. They believe a small galaxy collided and merged with the NGC 3310 galaxy. It has a slightly lopsided shape that suggests something recently happened to it.

A team of astronomers is trying to reconstruct the collision by mapping the ages of the starburst clusters against their locations. The starburst knots could act as markers revealing the destructive path of the merging galaxies. Astronomers believe the starburst clusters may evolve into regular globular clusters in a few billion years.