14 DAY TRIAL // Astronomers with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have recently released this new image of the brightly-lit Lagoon Nebula, a cosmic formation featuring immense clouds of gas and dust. The nebula was not photographed on purpose, but is rather a part of a much larger mosaic of the sky.
The image was collected using the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), which is installed at the Cerro Paranal Observatory, in the Atacama Desert of Chile. Despite being some 5,000 light-years away from Earth, the nebula can be seen here with an exquisite level of details.
The Lagoon Nebula, located in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer), is basically a massive stellar factory. Its rich supplies of dust and hydrogen gas are constantly used to generate young, blue stars, which in turn make the nebula glow from within, by bombarding it with intense ultraviolet light.
This cosmic formation is also known as Messier 8, and spans an estimated 100 light-years across. By comparison, our galaxy is around 100,000 light-years in diameter. A massive version of this image, featuring a resolution of around 16,000 pixels, is available here.