A wolf in the sky on Halloween: on October 31st, when the night of the witches was celebrated in many parts of the world, the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO) has revealed the extraordinary image of a dark nebula which looks like a wolf on a cosmic backgroundcaptured by Survey Telescope (VST) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.
Located in the constellation Scorpius, near the center of the Milky Way in the sky, it has been nicknamed Dark Wolf Nebula and is located about 5300 light years from Earth and occupies aarea in the sky equivalent to four full Moons. But in reality it is part of even larger nebula called Gum 55.
If you thought darkness equaled emptiness, think again – writes ESO – Dark nebulae are cold clouds of cosmic dustso dense that they obscure the light of stars and other objects behind them. As their name suggests, they do not emit visible light, unlike other nebulae
Their “darkness” is in fact due to the grains of dust inside them which absorb visible light and only let radiation at longer wavelengths pass through, such as infrared light.
Why nebulae are so important
Astronomers study these clouds of frozen dust because they often contain new, forming stars. Just last June, astronomers, thanks to the Webb Space Telescope, managed to capture a splendid image of the Serpent Nebula. The discovery was therefore considered a milestone for sky science.
In this case, in fact, the telescope managed to immortalize a group of protostellar outflowswhich form when jets of gas emitted by newborn stars collide with nearby gas and dust at high speed. In fact, i fundamentals of how stars are born.
The Dark Wolf Nebula
Tracing the wolf’s ghostly presence in the sky was only possible because it contrasts with a bright background. The image captured by VLT Survey Telescope spectacularly shows how the dark wolf stands out from the bright star-forming clouds behind him, made up mainly of hydrogen and glowing in reddish tones excited by the intense UV radiation of the newborn stars within them.
Some dark nebulae, such as the Coalsack Nebulathey can be seen by eye but not the Dark Wolf. This image was created using data from our proprietary telescope National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy (INAF) and hosted at theParanal Observatory of ESO, in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The telescope is equipped with a camera specially designed for map the southern sky in visible light.
The photo is the result of repeated images taken at different times, each with a filter that lets in a different color of light, all captured during the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+)which studied about 500 million objects in our Milky Way.
Investigations like this help scientists better understand the life cycle of stars in our galaxy, and the data obtained is rendered public via the ESO Science Portal.
How wonderful!
Source: ESO
