The European Southern Observatory has published a new image taken by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST). It shows a gas-dust cloud known as IC 2948.
The image shows countless nascent stars. Their powerful radiation ionizes the surrounding gas clouds, making them glow with pink hues. At the same time, the IC2948 is just a small fragment of something much larger.
It’s the Running Chicken Nebula. It is located 6,500 light years from Earth toward the constellation Centauri. If we could see it in the sky with the naked eye, it would cover an area equal to 25 full moons. By comparison, the area captured in the above image wouldn’t even make up a third of the lunar disk.
The Running Chicken Nebula is a maze of gas, dust, and young stars with high-intensity radiation eating away the surrounding matter. Cloud IC2948 is the brightest region of the nebula. In the image, you can see dark clouds that look like open hands ready to grab the blossoming stars around them. The study of IC2948 provides insight into how newborn luminaries form and behave.
Astronomers were able to get such a detailed portrait of IC2948 thanks to a 1.5 billion pixel image taken last year. Earlier we told you about this image.
According to ESO
