by Tendrils of gas and dust arc through the abyss of space as countless stars twinkle at their brightest in this image of a distant stellar nursery. But as striking as the snapshot is, it doesn’t seem to capture anything special.
“Do you feel lost when you look at this Photo of the Week?” European Southern Observatory (ESO) wrote in a statement with the image of 1.5 billion pixels. Exploring this gas cloud “means finding your way past countless nascent stars born in this vast stellar nursery.”
Indeed, the vast area of the nursery, captured by ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope in Chile, envelops you. The image captures the brightest part of the so-called Walking Chicken Nebulaa distant cloud of gas toward the constellation Centaurus, named for its striking bird-like appearance. The shown region, known as IC 2948, appears to some as the head of the cosmic bird and to others as its rear end.
The IC 2948 patch is filled with bright gas and dust plumage and sprinkled with blue stars, the hue that is a telltale sign of the stellar bodies’ hot and young existence. The stars are smart, but certainly not cheerful, as ESO put it. Intense radiation that the stars shoot into room drives away nearby material and carves out the parts of space in which they rule.
“Here we see creeping dark clouds, shaped like open hands about to grab hold of their surrounding blooming stars,” ESO said.
Telescope images of the Running Chicken Nebula and several other nebulae show that there are at least a few survivors of the radiation blast: the isolated dense, dark strings of gas and dust standing out against the bright background of the nebula. Then German-British astronomer William Herschel saw a ball for the first time in his telescope, that’s him said to have exclaimed: “Mein Gott, da is een Loch im Himmel.” (My God, there’s a hole in the sky.)
These “holes” are now called Bok spheres, named after the Dutch-American astronomer Bart Bok who first observed the dark clouds in the 1940s and compared them to the cocoons of insects. (The series of Bok globules in IC 2948 are specifically called Thackeray’s Globules, after their discoverer David Thackeray.)
Bok proposed that the clouds represented the earliest stages of star formation, in that they underwent a gravitational collapse before new stars formed in their interiors, where they would be protected from the shocking stellar radiation. The hypothesis was proven nearly half a century later, when near-infrared observations showed evidence of multiple stars in more than 50 spheres, though none of them seem to call the Walking Chicken Nebula their home.
The starry sky misthowever, remains a wonderful destination for both professional and amateur astronomers. The nebula spans 71 light years and covers an area of the sky as wide as 25 full moons.
“It would take an average chicken almost 21 billion years to run across it,” ESO said in an earlier publication press release. “That’s much longer than our universe has existed.”
