Stock 16 is a very young

Galactic Galactic is an American jam band from New Orleans, Louisiana. Origins and background Formed in 1994 as an octet (under the name Galactic Prophylactic) and including singer Chris Lane and guitarist Rob Gowen, the group was soon pared down to a ...

open cluster An open cluster is a type of star cluster made of up to a few thousand stars that were formed from the same giant molecular cloud and have roughly the same age. More than 1,100 open clusters have been discovered within the Milky Way galaxy, and ...

in the

H II region An H II region or HII region is a region of interstellar atomic hydrogen that is ionized. It is typically in a molecular cloud of partially ionized gas in which star formation has recently taken place, with a size ranging from one to hundre ...

RCW 75 (= Gum 48a). This region lies at the end of an "elephant trunk" shaped molecular cloud and may be a region with

triggered star formation Star formation is the process by which dense regions within molecular clouds in interstellar space, sometimes referred to as "stellar nurseries" or "star-forming regions", collapse and form stars. As a branch of astronomy, star formation includes ...

. The primary ionizing source for the H II region is the star HD 115455, with spectral type O7.5

III III or iii may refer to: Companies * Information International, Inc., a computer technology company * Innovative Interfaces, Inc., a library-software company * 3i, formerly Investors in Industry, a British investment company Other uses * I ...

. RCW 75 is also Gum 48a In the 1985 paper ''The young open cluster Stock 16: an example of star formation in an elephant trunk?'' it was proposed the Stock 16 cluster was an example of star formation. The study included UBV

photometry Photometry can refer to: * Photometry (optics), the science of measurement of visible light in terms of its perceived brightness to human vision * Photometry (astronomy), the measurement of the flux or intensity of an astronomical object's electrom ...

of over thirty stars in the cluster.

References

Open clusters Centaurus (constellation) Star-forming regions {{star-cluster-stub