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See the explosion set off when two 'teenage' stars collide

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Astronomers capture a detailed image of a few would-be suns crashing — and tearing up the place they were born in the process.
Sausage making can be messy, but so is making stars.
When we think about exploding stars, we tend to think of dying stars going supernova in fantastic fashion, but the above composite image shows how things can also blow up in the stellar nursery where star births happen.
One of these star factories can be seen in the Orion Molecular Cloud 1 (OMC-1) just behind the Orion Nebula some 1,500 light-years away. About 500 years ago, two adolescent protostars there grazed or collided with each other and touched off an explosion that launched nearby stellar siblings and streams of dust and gas into space at half the speed of light.

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