Black wolf in the sky. Amazing photo

The Dark Wolf Nebula is visible in the sky in the constellation Scorpius, near the center of the Milky Way. It is located about 5,300 light-years away and is part of the larger Gum 55 nebula. The image shows an area in the sky encompassing the four disks of the full Moon. It was presented by the European Southern Observatory on the occasion of Halloween.

“If anyone thought that darkness equals emptiness, they should think again,” the statement said, explaining that the dark nebulae in space they are cold clouds of dust so thick that they block the light of stars far behind them. Unlike other types of nebulae, these objects do not emit visible light because dust grains absorb this type of radiation. However, infrared radiation can penetrate through them.

“The image shows in spectacular detail how the dark wolf stands out against the background of glowing star-forming clouds behind it. The colorful clouds are composed mainly of hydrogen gas and glow in a reddish hue when excited by intense ultraviolet radiation from newborn stars,” we read.

The image was obtained by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), a sky survey telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. The telescope belongs to the National Astrophysical Institute of Italy (INAF) and has a special camera adapted to map the sky in the visible spectrum. The image shown has 283 million pixels and is a composite of photographs taken at different times and with different filters as part of a project called the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+), which examined about 500 million objects in the Milky Way.

ESO has indicated that some dark nebulae can be seen with the naked eye. An example is the Carbon Sack Nebula. The Mapuche, the people living in south-central Chile, call this nebula the word “pozoko”, which means a water well. In turn, the Incas called this object “yutu”, which refers to a bird similar to a partridge.