Sometimes at CNET Science we go really deep into explaining the wonders of the cosmos -- the marvelous impossibilities of black holes, the violent collisions of neutron stars, the wobble in the moon's orbit -- and other times we simply stare at photos of distant galaxies and sit in stunned silence.
This is one of the latter times.
On Friday, the European Southern Observatory released new images of nearby galaxies captured by two Earth-based telescopes in Chile, the "Very Large Telescope" and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, and NASA's Hubble Telescope (which is currently hobbled by an unfortunate glitch). The Observatory dubs the images "cosmic fireworks," but let's stop and think about these fireworks for just a few moments because they are much more than that.