{"id":52381,"date":"2024-11-01T14:16:47","date_gmt":"2024-11-01T14:16:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/?p=52381"},"modified":"2024-11-01T14:16:47","modified_gmt":"2024-11-01T14:16:47","slug":"new-eso-image-captures-a-wolf-like-dark-nebula","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/new-eso-image-captures-a-wolf-like-dark-nebula\/52381\/","title":{"rendered":"New ESO image captures a wolf-like dark nebula"},"content":{"rendered":"
Fittingly nicknamed the Dark Wolf Nebula, it was captured in a 283-million-pixel image by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO\u2019s Paranal Observatory in Chile.<\/p>\n
The dark nebula is located in the constellation Scorpius, near the centre of the Milky Way in the sky,\u00a0approximately 5,300 light-years from Earth.<\/p>\n
This image takes up an area in the sky equivalent to four full Moons but is actually part of an even larger nebula called Gum 55.<\/p>\n
Dark nebulae are cold clouds of cosmic dust so dense that they obscure the light of stars and other objects behind them.<\/p>\n
As their name suggests, unlike other nebulae, they do not emit visible light. Dust grains within them absorb visible light and only let through radiation at longer wavelengths<\/a>, like infrared light.<\/p>\n Astronomers study these clouds of frozen dust because they often contain new stars in the making.<\/p>\n This image shows in spectacular detail how the dark wolf stands out against the glowing star-forming clouds behind it.<\/p>\n The colourful clouds are built up mostly of hydrogen gas and glow in reddish tones, excited by the intense UV radiation from the newborn stars within them.<\/p>\n Some dark nebulae, like the Coalsack Nebula, can be seen with the naked eye \u2013\u2013 and play a key role in how First Nations interpret the sky \u2013\u2013 but not the Dark Wolf.<\/p>\n This image was created using data from the VLT Survey Telescope<\/a>, which is owned by the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy (INAF) and is hosted at ESO\u2019s Paranal Observatory in Chile\u2019s Atacama Desert.<\/p>\n The telescope has a specially designed camera to map the southern sky in visible light.<\/p>\n The picture was compiled from images taken at different times, each one with a filter letting in a different colour of light. They were all captured during the VST Photometric H\u03b1 Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+), which studied 500 million objects in our Milky Way.<\/p>\n Surveys like this help scientists to better understand the life cycle of stars within our home galaxy, and the obtained data are made publicly available through the ESO science portal<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The ESO has revealed an insightful new image of a dark nebula that creates the illusion of a wolf against a colourful cosmic backdrop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":52383,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[771],"tags":[801,3477],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMapping the southern sky in visible light<\/h3>\n