Not many nurseries play host to elephants, but this one does. Like a sand dune carved by the breeze, this cloud of dust and gas is whipped into bizarre shapes by the stellar winds that radiate from the stars it spawned. The fantastic forms include dark columns that astronomers call elephant trunks.
The are a celebrated example of this shape.
The image above was taken using a 2.2 metre telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile, by a team led by Giacomo Beccari of the European Southern Observatory.
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