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What it is : NGC 6357 , a diffuse discharge nebula
Where it is:8,000 light - years away , in the Scorpius configuration .
When it was share : Sept. 26 , 2024
Why it ’s so special : NGC 6357 , also visit the Lobster Nebula , is busy hand birth to huge hotshot . This monolithic star - form complex ’s dense effect — which stretch across 400 idle - years — is a snarl of dust tendrils surround hot young stars and shine clouds of gas , so much so that it ’s impossible to see what ’s going on inside the starring nursery with an optical telescope .
The arresting image , initially take in 2013 and available as azoomableversion , was revealed this week as one piece of a jigsaw that took 200,000 separate motion-picture show and 13 age to compile — thebiggest - ever infrared map of the Milky Way galaxy .
Infrared - sensitive camera are decisive in revealing what ’s happening in deep - sky objects like NGC 6357 . To take the images that would make up the immense Vía Láctea ( VVV ) survey , stargazer used the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy ( VISTA ) survey scope at the European Southern Observatory ’s Paranal Observatory , locate in Chile ’s Atacama desert . The VVV sketch ’s end was to scan theMilky Wayto discover its structure and thus explicate how it formed .
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VISTA ’s camera is sensitive to infrared light , which enables it to capture cold feature that beam only in previously unobserved wavelengths of light , such as gas and dust . This gives astronomers the ability to peer through junk clouds , which block the view of regular ocular telescope , and see proto - stars within .
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NGC 6357 is known as anemission nebula , a region of space where gasolene is ionize by uttermost ultraviolet radiation , which , in the case of NGC 6357 , is because of its monumental young blue - white-hot stars . Those stars are found in Pismis 24 , an open ace clump within NGC 6357 that hold in some genuinely monumental headliner . accord toNASA , Pismis 24 was home to Pismis 24 - 1 , a lustrous untested whiz thought to be 200 to 300 times more massive than the Lord’s Day . However , when theHubble Space Telescope study it in 2006 , it found two stars , each about 100 times the sun ’s passel , orbiting each other .
For more sublime outer space image , check up on out ourSpace Photo of the Week archive .
