In the center of the photo, a monstrous young star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun casts powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, creating a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities and mountains of gas and dust.

All this chaos is happening in the heart of the Lagoon Nebula, a vast stellar nursery located 4,000 light-years away and visible with binoculars simply as a patch of light with a glowing core.

The giant star, named Herschel 36, is emerging from its natal cocoon of material, unleashing scorching radiation and torrential stellar winds (streams of subatomic particles) that push the dust in the form of curtains. This action resembles the Sun breaking through the clouds at the end of an afternoon storm that sheds layers of rain.

The violent activity of Herschel 36 has blown holes in the bubble-shaped cloud, allowing astronomers to study this action-packed stellar breeding ground.

The robust star is 32 times more massive and eight times hotter than our Sun. It is almost nine times the diameter of our Sun. Herschel 36 is still very active because it is young by star standards, only 1 million years old. According to its mass, it will live another 5 million years. By comparison, our smallest Sun is 5 billion years old and will live another 5 billion years.

This region epitomizes a typical and raucous stellar nursery full of birth and destruction. The clouds may appear majestic and peaceful, but they are in a constant state of flux due to the torrent of scorching radiation and high-speed particles from the star's stellar winds. As the monster star spews out its natal cocoon of material with its powerful energy, it is suppressing the star formation around it.

Yet at the dark edges of this dynamic, bubble-shaped ecosystem, stars are forming within dense clouds of gas and dust. The dark, elephant-like "trunks" of material represent dense chunks of the cocoon that are resistant to erosion by scorching ultraviolet light and serve as incubators for fledgling stars. They are analogous to desert hills that resist climatic erosion.

I came across this data by chance and couldn't resist trying it just for fun. The data is very large and almost burned my computer, but I had a good afternoon working with it.

Greetings to all and take care.