Under the sea🪸⁣ ⁣ In 2020, NASAHubble released this image, nicknamed the “Cosmic Reef,” to celebrate 30 years in space. It shows a giant red nebula and its smaller blue neighbor, which are both part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located 163,000 light-years away. In this picture, we can see how young, energetic, massive stars illuminate and sculpt their birthplace with powerful winds and searing ultraviolet radiation.⁣ ⁣ At the heart of the big red nebula are sparkling stars, each of which are 10 to 20 times more massive than our Sun. The stars' ultraviolet radiation heats the surrounding dense gas. The massive stars also unleash fierce winds of charged particles that blast away lower-density gas, forming the bubble-like structures seen on the right, which resemble coral.⁣ ⁣ By contrast, the seemingly isolated blue nebula at lower left was created by a solitary mammoth star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun. The b...