Lighting the void: Awesome birth of star that's 300 times brighter than the sun

The light in these extraordinary images has travelled so far that it has taken 4,200 years to get here.

But, despite the distance, scientists say the photographs reveal, like no others before them, the immense forces unleashed when a star is born.

The two images were taken 18 years apart, the first with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico in 1996 and the second by an international team of astronomers led by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) last year.
 

The star – known as W75N(B)-VLA2 – is 300 times brighter and eight times bigger than our sun, although it is masked by a black cloud of space dust.

But what has most excited astronomers is the change in shape of the violet area of super-hot electrified winds that are being ejected by the young star.

The dramatic changes, in a cosmic blink of an eye relative to the age of the universe, is giving an unprecedented look at how young ‘protostars’ develop into fully-fledged stars.

The pictures, created by data from 27 radio telescope antennae in the New Mexico desert in the US, show the electrified wind expanding away from the star until it is slowed by the black and yellow cloud of dust surrounding it.