This is the coolest stuff...

Below are three actual pictures of the birth of a star taken by the Hubble Telescope. They don't look real, I know. They look like drawings.

What makes these pictures so fascinating is the sheer magnitude of the dimensions. The column on the left in the first picture is 60,000 AU's.

The AU is Astronomical Unit and is roughly the distance from the sun to the earth. And as we all remember from 8th grade science class, it's 93,000,000 miles. That's million by the way.

So the column to the left is approximately 93000000 * 60000 miles long. That's 5580000000000. 10 zeroes. Over 5 trillion miles.

To kind of put things in perspective our solar system is not quite 7.5 billion miles wide. You see those little finger like projections in the third picture? Each fingertip is somewhat larger than our own solar system.

Truly amazing.