Credit: ESO/A. R. G. do Brito do Vale et al.

Today’s Picture of the Week, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), seems to have captured a cosmic hawk as it spans its wings. While the dark clouds in the middle of the image make up the head and body of the bird of prey, the filaments extending away from the body to the left and right compose its wings. Below it, is a mesmerising blue nebula with massive newly born stars, whose intense radiation make the gas around them glow brightly. Altogether the image shows the RCW 36 nebula, located about 2300 light-years away in the Vela constellation. Coincidently, this nebula, resembling a hawk, was also captured by a hawk — the HAWK-I instrument on the VLT. While the most apparent stars in this image may be the massive and bright baby stars, the astronomers behind this image are actually more interested in hidden, very dim stars called brown dwarfs — “objects unable to fuse hydrogen in their cores,” explains Afonso do Brito do Vale, a PhD student at the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Portugal, and the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France, and lead author of a new paper where this image was presented. HAWK-I is perfectly suited for this task. It observes at infrared wavelengths, where these cold failed stars are more easily spotted, and it can correct atmospheric turbulence with adaptive optics, delivering sharp images like this one. Besides providing invaluable data to understand how brown dwarfs form, the study produced a striking image of “massive stars ‘pushing’ away the clouds of gas and dust around them almost like an animal breaking through its eggshell for the first time,” as do Brito do Vale describes. Who knows, perhaps the cosmic hawk is guarding his baby stars — watching over them as they “hatch”. Link Research paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics

Provider: European Southern Observatory

Image Source: https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2609a/

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

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License