Swimming across the Lagoon Nebula

The new image of the Lagoon Nebula, captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to celebrate its 28th year in space, shows colourful clouds of gas and dust of this star-formation region in incredible detail.

The image reveals a fantastic landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust. This dust-and-gas landscape is being sculpted by powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds unleashed by a young star. Located at the centre of the image, the star, known as Herschel 36, is about 200 000 times brighter than our Sun.