In a scene reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” scientists have captured swirling nebulae, dark dust lanes and sparkling star clusters in remarkable detail.
This spectacular new image from the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the National Science Foundation’s Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile shows the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud, one of the closest active star-forming regions to our solar system. It’s a place where temperatures fall to around minus 440 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 260 degrees Celsius), allowing dense pockets of gas and dust to collapse and form new stars.
The portrait also combines star-forming regions with an ancient globular cluster far beyond them, all within a single field of view. The 570-megapixel DECam’s 74 detectors and 3-foot-wide (1 meter) lens make it one of the world’s most powerful wide-field astronomical instruments.
On the left side of the image is the glowing nebula NGC 6729, nestled within the molecular cloud. The blue is a reflection nebula, which is caused by dust reflecting starlight, while the orange shows an emission nebula, which forms when ultraviolet radiation from a young star ionizes gas with its youthful radiation. At the heart of NGC 6729 is R Coronae Australis, a binary star system whose stars complete an orbit of each other every 43 to 47 years.
Glittering like a firework on the upper right is NGC 6723, a globular cluster approximately 29,000 light-years from Earth. Also called the Chandelier Cluster, it contains hundreds of thousands of stars that formed billions of years ago, with some almost as old as the universe itself. However, astronomers suspect that there are several populations of similarly aged stars within the cluster, indicating a complex evolutionary history. NGC 6729 and NGC 6723 are favorite targets for astronomers and astrophotographers because of their relatively close proximity to Earth. However, because they’re found below the constellation Sagittarius, they’re best seen from the Southern Hemisphere. If you’ve got the right vantage point, a good backyard telescope will help you see this chaotic cradle of star formation.