This is the original image from which
this closeup has been excerpted.
Rosette Molecular Cloud and Cluster NGC2244The main comprehensive study published to date on the Rosette molecular clouds surrounding the Mon OB2 association is a 1980 paper by Blitz and Thaddeus. They estimated the nebula distance to be 1600 pc. A follow-up study published in 1998 by Schneider and colleagues presented more detailed observations of part of the Rosette molecular clouds and some embedded infrared sources.
Many of the ionizing stars are concentrated in the massive young star cluster NGC 2244. Kharchenko gives an age of 5 million years and a distance of 1440 pc for NGC 2244.
A Chandra X-ray telescope survey also lists about 30 ionizing stars for NGC 2244 in total. The Chandra study cites a distance of 1400 pc and an age of 2 million years. It reports that most of the cluster is centered around the O5f V star HD 46150 (that has a luminosity 450000 time larger than that of the Sun, and is up to 60 times more massive) with little clustering around the hotter O4 class HD 46223 (400000 times brighter than the Sun, and approximately 50 times more massive) both visible in our annotated version here.
(Info excerpted from galxymap.org and wikipedia)
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