The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) has captured a stunning image of a star-forming region located 8,000 light-years away from Earth.
The Lobster Nebula captured by DECam. Photo: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA.
Attached to the 4-meter diameter Victor M. Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, DECam is part of a sky survey project aimed at searching for evidence of dark energy – an invisible form of energy believed by astronomers to accelerate the universe’s expansion.
While scanning the skies, the telescope’s camera has taken some breathtaking views of the cosmos. In a newly released image on September 12, the Lobster Nebula, also known as NGC 6357, appears like a blazing fire in the constellation Scorpius, situated about 8,000 light-years from Earth.
The image reveals a star-forming region that spans 400 light-years in width, with young stars scattered throughout the clouds of gas and dust. At the center lies a discrete structure referred to by astronomers as an open star cluster, comprising very young and massive stars.
Some of the bright spots surrounding the star cluster are known as protostars – newly formed stars still enshrouded in dense dust and gradually revealing their radiant beauty. The interstellar winds, galactic radiation, and strong magnetic fields interact with the nebula, compressing the gas and dust into streams and filaments.
DECam stands out as one of the world’s highest-performance wide-field CCD (charge-coupled device) cameras, a type of digital imaging technology capable of capturing extremely faint sources of light. This device can provide 400 to 500 images each night and has recently reached the milestone of 1 million individual exposures.
To capture NGC 6357, astronomers used various specialized filters to isolate specific wavelengths of light. The final image is a combination of multiple exposures taken with different filters and stacked on top of each other.
By observing distant star clusters in these wavelengths, astronomers can gain a deeper understanding not only of motion but also of temperature and chemical composition within the nebula.