The VLT telescope captures a cosmic koi fish

June 14 () –

The VLT Survey Telescope (VST), located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, has captured the colorful Gum 3 nebula, which looks like a Koi fish in the picture.

Equipped with the OmegaCAM instrument, a huge 268 megapixel camera, The telescope is designed to probe large areas of the southern sky in visible light and take 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 of Monoceros and Canis Major. It is named in honor of Colin Stanley Gum, an Australian astronomer who cataloged 84 nebulae in the southern sky.

When intense ultraviolet radiation from nearby young stars collides with hydrogen atoms in the cloud, they emit visible light in very specific colors, which we see as shades of red and pink in the image. At the same time, tiny dust particles within the cloud reflect starlight, especially blue colors, similar to those that make the sky look blue here on Earth. This play of colors makes nebulae like this spectacular to see, reports ESO it’s a statement.

This image not only shows the color, but also the lack of it. Just to the right of the brightest part of the cloud, there is a large mass of dust that blocks some of the visible light, hiding the stars from the VST and from us.