Herschel 36 Giant Star

This colorful Hubble image gives us a window seat to the universe’s extraordinary tapestry of stellar birth and destruction.

At the center of the photo, a monster young star at the heart of the Lagoon Nebula (located 4,000 light-years away ) called Herschel 36 200,000 times brighter than our Sun is blasting powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, carving out a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust.

The giant star is bursting out of its natal cocoon of material, unleashing blistering radiation and torrential stellar winds (streams of subatomic particles) that push dust away in curtain-like sheets. This action resembles the Sun bursting through the clouds at the end of an afternoon thunderstorm that showers sheets of rainfall.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI
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