2000 light years from Earth, a heavenly angel is watching over us. Thankfully, she’s a little too far to see the horrors our species get up to. Located in the constellation Cygnus, the Celestial Snow Angel is an emission nebula and a star formation region that looks undeniably like its namesake. At the centre of this cosmic cloud is a powerhouse star known as S106 IRl, shining bright with infrared radiation.

This hefty star tips the scales at about 15 times the mass of our Sun. It's shooting out two mighty jets from its poles, which crank up the heat on the nearby matter to a sizzling 10,000°C. This stellar nursery also created hundreds of smaller siblings—low-mass brown dwarfs and baby stars called protostars.