Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin

While testing a new subsystem on the SPHERE planet-hunting instrument on ESO’s Very Large telescope, astronomers were able to capture dramatic details of the turbulent stellar relationship in the binary star R Aquarii with unprecedented clarity —even compared to observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The image is a colour composite made from exposures from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 (DSS2), and shows the region surrounding R Aquarii, the vivid orange point at the centre of the image.

Provider: European Southern Observatory

Image Source: https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1840d/

Curator: European Southern Observatory, Garching bei München, None, Germany

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License