It resembles an abstract painting

Jul 7, 2009 23:51 GMT  ·  By

If you point your telescope towards the Sagittarius constellation at night, and have a very powerful tool, you could see the dazzling stellar nursery Omega Nebula – also known as the Swan Nebula – some 5,500 light-years away. In its continuous star-forming activity, it is light from the inside out that gives it the halo-like appearance essentially all nebulas are famous for. Made up of incredibly large amounts of stellar gas and dust, and measuring some 15 light-years across, the “star generator” is a real sight to behold, and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has proven this by picturing it again.

The new image was obtained by using advanced devices on the ESO New Technology Telescope (NTT), in La Silla, Chile, and especially the EMMI instrument attached to the 3,58-meter observatory. The central part of the stellar nursery was imaged in very precise and accurate details, and the experts who worked on it say that it will give astronomers something to talk about for a long time. The photo follows a tradition at ESO, which already used another instrument called SOFI in 2000, mounted on the same telescope, to snap another picture of Omega's central regions.

What's truly remarkable about the newly obtained material is the fact that it shows some differences from the one taken about a decade ago. In the meantime, the region has generated a lot of new stars, and their light, coupled with rampant radiations and strong stellar winds, has created intricate and ultimately beautiful filigree structures in the background, which the researchers now enjoy analyzing. In the section of the overall image attached to this article, the massive luminous areas are, in fact, the result of massive stars ending their brief existence and exploding back into their constituent matter, which they ejected into space. The stellar nursery itself is only active for a few million years, the researchers say.

The Omega Nebula was first discovered in 1745 by Jean-Philippe Loys de Cheseaux, a Swiss astronomer. Over the years, debates have raged on as to what type of formation it is, as the classification patterns of today were unknown at the time. Many fellow astronomers believed that the formation was, in fact, nothing by a cluster of stars that was too distant to resolve with existing telescopes. It wasn't until 1866 that William Huggins used a new instrument, the astronomical spectrograph, to finally conclude that the formation was a cloud of gas and dust.