This is one lagoon you wouldn't want to swim in without a suit. The Lagoon Nebula is a 100-light-year-wide stellar nursery where bright new stars are being formed.
Lying at a distance of about 5000 light years from Earth, the Lagoon Nebula can be seen with the naked eye as a faint smudge in the Sagittarius constellation. Despite its distance, its enormous size means it appears three times as wide as the full moon in the sky.
The thinly spread dust is collapsing together in places to form new stars, which burst into life when they become sufficiently large and dense. The Lagoon Nebula is a particularly fertile stellar garden: it's the origin of the cluster NGC 6530, which contains 100 stars but represents only a fraction of the stars being produced.
This image of the Nebula was taken by the VLT Survey Telescope in Paranal, Chile, as part of a huge survey spanning much of the Milky Way.
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