New ESO image captures a wolf-like dark nebula
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has revealed an insightful new image of a dark nebula that creates the illusion of a wolf-like silhouette against a colourful cosmic backdrop. Fittingly nicknamed 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 nebula is located in the constellation Scorpius, near the centre of the Milky Way in the sky, approximately 5,300 light-years from Earth. This image takes up an area in the sky equivalent to four full Moons but is actually part of an even larger nebula called Gum 55. What are dark nebulae and why are they important? Dark nebulae are cold clouds of cosmic dust so dense that they obscure the light of stars and other objects behind them. As their name suggests, unlike other nebulae, they do not emit visible light. Dust grains within them absorb visible light and only let through radiation at longer wavelengths, like infrared light. Astronomers study these clouds of frozen dust because they often contain …
