The Running Chicken Nebula | European Southern Observatory
The Running Chicken Nebula comprises several clouds—all can be seen in this vast 1.5-billion pixel image from the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal site. This image spans an area in the sky of about 25 full Moons. The clouds shown in wispy pink plumes are full of gas and dust, illuminated by the young and hot stars within them.
Distance: 6,500 light years
This image, edge to edge, is 270 light-years wide. It would take an average chicken almost 21 billion years to run across it—much longer than our Universe has been around for.
Image Description: Wispy pink clouds pop out of a dark background. The brightest and largest cloud is offset from center to the lower left. A cloud ridge cuts vertically through the center of the frame, with a large bright blue-white spot in the middle. To the right of the image are three smaller clouds. Dotted across the image are blue, orange and white points of varying size and brightness.
This vast stellar nursery is located in the constellation Centaurus (the Centaur), at about 6,500 light-years from Earth. Young stars within this nebula emit intense radiation that makes the surrounding hydrogen gas glow in shades of pink.
The brightest region within the nebula is called IC 2948, where people can see the chicken’s head and others its rear end. The wispy pastel contours are ethereal plumes of gas and dust. Towards the center of the image, marked by the bright, vertical, almost pillar-like, structure, is IC 2944. The brightest twinkle in this particular region is Lambda Centauri, a star visible to the naked eye that is much closer to us than the nebula itself.
There are, however, many young stars within IC 2948 and IC 2944 themselves. Regions of the nebula, known as Bok globules, can withstand the fierce bombardment from the ultraviolet radiation. Bok globules are small, dark, and dense pockets of dust and gas dotted across the nebula.
Other regions pictured here include, to the upper right, Gum 39 and 40, and to the lower right, Gum 41. Aside from nebulae, there are countless orange, white and blue stars, like fireworks in the sky.
This image is a large mosaic comprising hundreds of separate frames carefully stitched together. The individual images were taken through filters that let through light of different colors that were then combined into the final result presented here. The observations were conducted with the wide-field camera OmegaCAM on the VST, a telescope owned by the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy (INAF) in Chile’s Atacama Desert that is ideally suited for mapping the southern sky in visible light.
The data that went into making this mosaic were taken as part of the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+), a project aimed at better understanding the life cycle of stars.
Credit: ESO/VPHAS+ team
Acknowledgement: CASU
Release Date: Dec. 21, 2023
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