This Stunning Dark Nebula Looks Like a Cosmic Sentinel Watching The Stars

You will find shapes that stir the imagination if you look deep into the darkness. If you keep staring, you'll soon learn that our Universe is more amazing than the human mind can imagine.

A recent image released by the European Southern Observatory shows a dark nebula 7 light-years long looking like a titanic lighthouse. Maybe it's a giant that wants to eat planets. It was shrouded in shadow.

This darkness is not a destroyer of worlds.

The new image was taken from the Very Large Telescope. The Cone Nebula is located in the constellation Monoceros and is part of a larger complex 2,500 light years away.

It might not look like any other nebulae you're used to seeing. There are different types of nebulae. The light of nearby stars is reflected by some. Some of them emit their own light.

The Cone Nebula is thick with dust that absorbs light. Light that is invisible to the human eye can penetrate them.

The types of clouds that are opaque are called molecular clouds. The places where baby stars are born are included in these. The cloud cools because the dust carries away thermal energy and makes the light invisible. Without heat, gravity overwhelms the clumps of dust and gas and causes them to coalesce.

These dense clumps form the seeds of stars; spinning, they draw in more mass from the surrounding cloud, giving the growing star with the pressure needed to kick-start fusion in its core.

Astronomers call the star's output feedback. Powerful radiation pressure is created by the star's ultraviolet light and the star's magnetic field lines. The baby star is pushed away by a stellar wind.

The Cone Nebula is an icon. Baby stars, burning blue and hot, are at the stage of their life where their feedback is blasted away at the dusty nebula. The Pillars of Creation are famous.

The particulars of the star formation processes that take place in dense clouds are revealed by the instruments that can see the Universe in the form of a telescope.

There are details that disappear in other wavelength visible light images. It is only by studying the full spectrum that we can understand everything that is happening in these structures.

The new image can be downloaded from the website.