This image of the week shows the colorful Gum 3 nebula as seen with the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), installed at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Chilean Atacama Desert. Those who pay attention to the details of this image obtained with the VST will be able to see that part of Gum 3 resembles a Koi fish. Equipped with the OmegaCAM instrument (a huge 268 megapixel camera), the telescope is designed to study large areas of the southern sky in visible light and obtain stunning images like this one.
Gum 3 is an interstellar cloud of gas and dust located about 3,600 light years away, between the constellations Monoceros and Canis Major. It is named after Colin Stanley Gum, an Australian astronomer who cataloged 84 nebulae in the southern sky.
When the intense ultraviolet radiation from nearby young stars hits the hydrogen atoms in the cloud, they emit visible light in very specific colors that we see in the image in reddish and pink tones. At the same time, small dust particles inside the cloud reflect starlight, especially in blue colors, similar to those that make the sky look blue here on Earth. This play of colors makes nebulas like this spectacular.
This image shows not only the color, but also the absence of it. Look closely at the area just to the right of the brightest part of the cloud (to the right of the pink “Koi-smic fish”). Is there nothing that seems strange to you? It’s not that there are actually fewer stars in that dark area; On the contrary, there is a large mass of dust that blocks some of the visible light, hiding the stars from both the VST and us.
Link
Credit:
ESO/VPHAS+ team. Backup: CASU
