New ESO image captures ‘dark wolf’ in the sky

Dark Wolf Nebula – WHAT

MADRID, October 31 (EUROPE PRESS) –

For Halloween, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) showed this eerie image of a dark nebula creating an illusion wolf-like silhouette on a colorful space background.

Called the Dark Wolf Nebula, it was captured in a 283-million-pixel image by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.

The Dark Wolf Nebula is located in the constellation Scorpius, near the center of the Milky Way in the sky, approximately 5,300 light-years from Earth. This image occupies an area in the sky equal to four full moons. but it is actually part of an even larger nebula called Gum 55.

Dark nebulae are cold clouds of cosmic dust so dense that they block out the light of stars and other objects behind them. As their name suggests, they do not emit visible light, unlike other nebulae. The dust grains inside absorb visible light and transmit only radiation with longer wavelengths, such as infrared. Astronomers study these icy dust clouds because they often contain new stars forming.

This image shows in striking detail how the dark wolf stands out against the bright star-forming clouds behind it. The colorful clouds are composed mainly of hydrogen gas and glow with reddish tones, excited by intense ultraviolet radiation from the newborn stars within, ESO said. in the statement.

Some dark nebulae like the Coalsack Nebulacan be seen with the naked eye and plays a key role in how indigenous peoples interpret the sky, but not the Dark Wolf. This image was created using data from the VLT survey telescope, which belongs to Italy’s National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) and is located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert, Chile. The telescope is equipped with a camera specifically designed to map the southern sky in visible light.

The image was composed of images taken at different times, each with a filter allowing a different color of light to pass through. All of them were captured during the VST Photometric Ha Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+), which has studied about 500 million objects in our Milky Way.

Research like this helps scientists better understand the life cycle of stars in our galaxy, and the resulting data is made available to the public through ESO’s Science Portal.