New ESO image captures a ‘dark wolf’ in the sky

Oct. 31 () –

For Halloween, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) revealed this spooky image of a dark nebula that creates the illusion of a wolf-like silhouette against a colorful cosmic background.

Dubbed the Dark Wolf Nebula, it was captured in a 283 million pixel image by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.

The Dark Wolf Nebula is located in the constellation Scorpio, near the center of the Milky Way in the sky, about 5,300 light years from Earth. This image occupies an area in the sky equivalent to four full moons, but it is actually part of an even larger nebula called Gum 55.

Dark nebulae are cold clouds of cosmic dust, so dense that they obscure the light from stars and other objects behind them. As their name suggests, they do not emit visible light, unlike other nebulae. The dust grains inside absorb visible light and only let radiation at longer wavelengths, such as infrared light, pass through. Astronomers study these icy dust clouds because they often contain new stars in formation.

This image shows in spectacular detail how the dark wolf stands out against the bright star-forming clouds behind it. The colorful clouds are made up mainly of hydrogen gas and glow in reddish tones excited by the intense ultraviolet radiation of the newborn stars inside, reports ESO in a statement.

Some dark nebulae like the Coalsack Nebulacan be seen with the naked eye — and play a key role in how First Nations interpret the sky — but not the Dark Wolf. This image was created using data from the VLT Survey Telescope, which is owned by Italy’s National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) and hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, in the Atacama Desert, Chile. The telescope is equipped with a camera specially designed to map the southern sky in visible light.

The image was compiled from images taken at different times, each with a filter that let in a different color of light. All were captured during the Ha photometric survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VST Photometric Ha Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge, VPHAS+), which has studied about 500 million objects in our Milky Way.

Surveys like this help scientists better understand the life cycle of stars within our galaxy, and the data obtained is made available to the public through the ESO science portal.