Fireworks of newborn stars

Even though it looks stunning by itself, this Picture of the Week is actually only a tiny part of a 1.5-billion-pixel image of the Running Chicken Nebula. It forms the comb on the running chicken’s head — at least according to some people, because everyone seems to see a different chicken! The data for this gigantic image was captured by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), a facility of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics hosted and operated by ESO. 

But for now, let’s zoom back in on GUM 39, as this nebula is officially called. In the sky, you will find it in the Centaurus constellation, about 6500 light-years from Earth. All around the nebula, orange, white and blue stars are dotting the sky like fireworks. The pink glow that you see are fumes of hydrogen gas, illuminated by the intense radiation from newborn stars. The nebula is also crossed by dark lanes of cosmic dust that block the light behind them.

Nebulae like this are also called stellar nurseries, because as these dense clouds of molecular gas gravitationally collapse they give birth to plenty of new stars. With telescopes like the VST and ALMA, scientists observe these nebulae to get a better understanding of the complex process of how stars are born. 

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• Fly over the Running Chicken Nebula