The light in these extraordinary images has travelled so far that it has taken 4,200 years to get here. But, despite the distance, scientists say the photographs reveal, like no others before them, the immense forces unleashed when a star is born. The two images were taken 18 years apart, the first with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico in 1996 and the second by an international team of astronomers led by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) last year. Scroll down for video . Astronomers have used a telescope in New Mexico to watch a star take shape over eight years. This simulation shows how the outflow of material from the star has dramatically expanded as it takes shape. A simulated image from 1996 is on the left, and another from 2014 is on the right . The star – known as W75N(B)-VLA2 – is 300 times brighter and eight times bigger than our sun, although it is masked by a black cloud of space dust. But what has most excited astronomers is the change in shape of the violet area of super-hot electrified winds that are being ejected by the young star. The dramatic changes, in a cosmic blink of an eye relative to the age of the universe, is giving an unprecedented look at how young ‘protostars’ develop into fully-fledged stars. The pictures, created by data from 27 radio telescope antennae in the New Mexico desert in the U.S., show the electrified wind expanding away from the star until it is slowed by the black and yellow cloud of dust surrounding it. These images of the star were taken by the��Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico. On the left is the star as seen in 1996, with its dust wrapped tightly around it, while by 2014 in the image on the right, this outflow has been pushed out into an elongated shape . This artist's illustration shows the development of W75N(B)-VLA-2. On the left, a hot wind from the young star expands nearly spherically, as seen in 1996. On the right right, as seen in 2014, the hot wind has been shaped by encountering a dusty, doughnut-shaped torus around the star and appears elongated . In the 1996 picture there is a relatively small region of space wind surrounding the star. But 18 years later that has expanded into a rugby-ball shape – because the dust has formed a doughnut shape around the star and offers less resistance to the space winds at its poles. Astronomer Carlos Carrasco-Gonzalez of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said: ‘The comparison is remarkable. ‘We're seeing this dramatic change in real time, so this object is providing us an exciting opportunity to watch over the next few years as a very young star goes through the early stages of its formation.’ The team will now continue to observe the star and see how it develops over the next few years. ‘Our understanding of how massive young stars develop is much less complete than our understanding of how sun-like stars develop,’ Dr Carrasco-Gonzalez said. ‘It's going to be really great to be able to watch one as it changes. We expect to learn a lot from this object.' Take a look at the amount of fuel for star formation in the universe, compared to the number of stars, and you'll notice something strange - there should be 10 times as many stars as there are. It's a problem that has perplexed scientists, but a study in early March claimed to have an answer, saying that the heat in star-forming clouds may be hindering stellar formation. They say that the temperatures are likely too hot to allow reasonable amounts of star formation, which leads to the lower number of stars we observe in the cosmos today. 'The amount of fuel for star formation outpaces the amount of stars 10 times, so these clusters should be really star-rich,' said Dr Michael McDonald, a Hubble Fellow in Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. 'You really need some mechanism to prevent gas from cooling, otherwise the universe would have 10 times as many stars.' The theory proposed by the researchers from MIT and Michigan State University suggests a number of reasons for why this is so. Researchers say that for some galaxy clusters the intracluster gas may simply be too hot - on the order of hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius. Even if one region experiences some cooling, the intensity of the surrounding heat would keep that region from cooling further - an effect known as conduction.
Astronomers have used a telescope in New Mexico to watch a star form.
Named W75N(B)-VLA2 it is 300 times brighter than the sun.
Images from 1996 and 2014 show how it is beginning to take shape.
It could provide unprecedented insight into how huge stars are born.