The Tarantula shreds its enormous cocoon

It is 20 quadrillion kilometers across if it is an arachnid.

That is a large spider. There is an immense cloud of gas and dust called the Tarantula Nebula, which is located 170,000 light-years away in the Large Milkyic Cloud.

The cluster of stars in its center has a half million times the mass of the Sun. It is so large that it may be forming a cluster in the future. There are so many massive stars in this cluster that they are about the upper limit for stars in the current Universe.

The environment is affected by a lot of power locked up in there.

A large cloud of dense, cold gas surrounds the nebula. It emits no visible light, making it hard to see. Some of the gas in this cloud is carbon monoxide, which glows at a wavelength far outside what our eyes can see. Astronomers were able to see the true nature of what those stars were doing when they pointed it at the Tarantula.

The ALMA observations of carbon monoxide are colored so that we can see them when we look at an image of the cluster. They look like things are going off. The denser parts of the cloud are going to be destroyed by the stars.

The stars are thousands of times brighter than the sun. It's so much energy that the gas at their surfaces can be blown off by it, screaming away as a stellar wind that can be very fast. When that outflowing gas slams into the colder surrounding cloud, it can erode and blow away denser clumps of material, forming long tails. They all point away from the stars. There is a hint on what is happening there.

The cluster is young, so it has not been long enough to destroy the cold cloud. The gas can't collapse to form new stars if it's being shredded.

There are bright spots in the filaments. The velocities of the gas were measured by the astronomer. They see a big spread of velocities toward and away from us, which is expected in turbulent gas, even as the overall gas is flowing away from the cluster. The density of the gas may not be enough to disrupt the knots.

The knots may still collapse to form stars.

That is amazing. A nest of bird eggs in a storm. I wouldn't have thought that would be possible. There is a lot of gas floating around in that cloud, so some of the denser spots are likely to be strong. It is still shocking.

It's not uncommon that the same structure is found in the Orion Nebula. It is possible that this is common in large star forming nebulae.

It's nice to think that stars are being born out there, providing light and heat and the necessary ingredients for planets to form and, perhaps, life, even in places where I wouldn't bet against it.

Sometimes it seems like the universe really wants to make stars, and the fools who think it won't are right.