Stars violently destroy their birthplace in a burst of vibrant color, as images captured by the MUSE instrument on the European Space Observatory’s Very Large Telescope have shown. The burst created what scientists have dubbed the "pillars of destruction."

According to a release from ESO, the steeples and pillars in the images are made out dust and gas clouds in the Carina Nebula, a hub of star formation about 7,500 light-years away. Though similar to the structures found in the Pillars of Creation, these pillars were created out of a very different nature.

ESO PhD student Anna McLeod led the team that observed the pillars. Their findings were published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"What is so fascinating about these images is that they might not be as sharp as those obtained with Hubble, but each single pixel in the image also comes with a spectrum across pretty much the entire visible wavelength range, making this an extremely rich dataset," McLeod told FoxNews.com.

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One of the consequences of a massive star’s formation is that it starts destroying the cloud in which it was born.

Such stars typically expel huge amounts of radiation, which has enough energy to strip atoms of their electrons, according to the release. This process is known as photoevaporation, and it causes gas to dissolve into ions and disperse. By examining the results from the evaporation, the researchers determined that there was a clear correlation between how much ionizing radiation was being emitted in nearby stars and the evaporation of the pillars.

While the pillars appear to be dense, the clouds of dust and gas forming the nebula are actually very sparse, the release also said. There’s a possibility that radiation and stellar winds from massive stars actually help to fortify denser spots within the pillars, allowing them to be able to form stars, the ESO release added.

Though the idea of massive stars destroying their own birthplaces sounds chaotic, the intricacies of the stars and pillars' relationship are still not fully understood.

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