The Gum 39 Nebula: Fireworks of Newborn Stars | ESO VLT Survey Telescope

The Gum 39 Nebula: Fireworks of Newborn Stars | ESO VLT Survey Telescope

This image shows a big nebulous cloud called GUM 39 at the center, taking up most of the frame. The nebula is very opaque and bright pink at the top and more translucent towards the bottom. One very bright blue star is visible in the middle of the nebula as well as three smaller blue ones to the left of it. Three bright blue stars are also visible at the bottom of the image. The dark background is full of small stars in different colors.

Even though it looks stunning by itself, this image is actually only a tiny part of a 1.5-billion-pixel image of the Running Chicken Nebula. It forms the comb on the running chicken’s head, however, everyone seems to see a different chicken! The data for this gigantic image was captured by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), a facility of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics hosted and operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). 

In the sky, you will find the Gum 39 Nebula in the Centaurus constellation, about 6,500 light-years from Earth. All around the nebula, orange, white and blue stars are dotting the sky like fireworks. The pink glow that you see are fumes of hydrogen gas, illuminated by the intense radiation from newborn stars. The nebula is also crossed by dark lanes of cosmic dust that block the light behind them.

Nebulae like this are also called stellar nurseries, because as these dense clouds of molecular gas gravitationally collapse they give birth to plenty of new stars. With telescopes like the VST and ALMA, scientists observe these nebulae to get a better understanding of the complex process of how stars are born.

Credit: ESO/VPHAS+ survey

Release Date: Oct. 14, 2024

#NASA #ESO #Space #Astronomy #Science #Nebulae #Nebula #Gum39 #RunningChickenNebula #StellarNursery #Centaur #Constellation #MilkyWayGalaxy #Cosmos #Universe #VLTSurveyTelescope #ParanalObservatory #Chile #SouthAmerica #Europe #STEM #Education