A Cosmic Flower Blooms and Sends Its Seeds Into the Void

NGC 7129 is a fascinating and terribly lovely object. It's a stellar nursery, a site of active star formation, buried deep within an invisible cloud of very cold molecular gas and dust. Luckily for us, a handful of massive stars were born near the edge of this cloud, carving a blister in its side and exposing their fierce light and beauty to us: Holy wow! That image is a combination of observations using the giant 10-meter Subaru telescope, the 0.81 meter Schulman Telescope (from my old friend A...