A gorgeous new image of a distant nebula has been captured by the European Southern Observatory (ESO)’s VLT Survey Telescope. It shows part of the Sh2-284 nebula, a rarely imaged but stunning cloud of dust and gas located a massive 15,000 light-years away from Earth.
This nebula is a busy region of star formation, known as a stellar nursery, where young stars are born from swirls of dust and gas. As this matter moves around it forms into small clumps, which gradually grow and gather more material until they have enough gravity to attract material to them, becoming the seed of a new star. As these bright young stars are born they illuminate the dust and gas around them, creating the glowing nebula effect.
The newly born stars also sculpt the matter around them. “The winds from the central cluster of stars push away the gas and dust in the nebula, hollowing out its center,” ESO explains. “As the winds encounter denser pockets of material, these offer more resistance meaning that the areas around them are eroded away first. This creates several pillars that can be seen along the edges of Sh2-284 pointing at the center of the nebula, such as the one on the right-hand side of the frame. While these pillars might look small in the image, they are in fact several light-years wide and contain vast amounts of gas and dust out of which new stars form.”
The VLT Survey Telescope is a huge 2.6-meter telescope located in the Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile. This location, at high altitude with very little rainfall and far from major sources of light pollution, is ideal for large ground-based telescopes. The VLT Survey Telescope is located next to the Very Large Telescope, and together the pair cover a range of wavelengths from ultraviolet to near-infrared. The Survey Telescope takes mostly wide-angle images and helps select specific targets which can be imaged in more detail by the VLT.
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