See the dramatic and spooky Dark Wolf Nebula

A stunning space image from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) shows a spooky cosmic wolf, in a structure fittingly named the Dark Wolf Nebula. Captured using ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope in Chile, the full image has 283 million pixels and shows the nebula located 5,300 light-years away.

Many of the most striking structures you see in space images are nebulae, which are clouds of dust and gas that often host forming stars. Often, these nebulae will be illuminated in beautiful colors due to radiation from the young stars inside them, which ionizes gas and makes it glow. But this nebula is the opposite, being a type called a dark nebula. In these nebulae, the dust that makes up the cloud is so thick and dense that it prevents visible light from passing through it, appearing like a dark smudge.

“If you thought that darkness equals emptiness, think again,” ESO explains. “Dark nebulae are cold clouds of cosmic dust, so dense that they obscure the light of stars and other objects behind them. As their name suggests, they do not emit visible light, unlike other nebulae. Dust grains within them absorb visible light and only let through radiation at longer wavelengths, like infrared light. Astronomers study these clouds of frozen dust because they often contain new stars in the making.”

Fittingly nicknamed the Dark Wolf Nebula, this cosmic cloud was captured in a 283-million-pixel image by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. Located around 5,300 light-years from Earth, the cold clouds of cosmic dust create the illusion of a wolf-like silhouette against a colorful backdrop of glowing gas clouds. ESO/VPHAS+ team

To capture this image, a series of different separate images had to be taken using different filters. Each filter captures a particular wavelength of light, and when the data is put together, it forms the colorful and detailed image we see. The original images were taken as part of a survey called the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge, which focuses on the main part of the galaxy as seen from the southern sky. It has also taken previous beautiful images of objects like the Lagoon Nebula and a striking area of the sky called Baade’s Window.

The survey was completed in August 2018, but data from the 500 million objects it covered in our Milky Way is still being used for scientific discovery and for creating beautiful images like this one. If you fancy going digging through the data for yourself, the full trove of images is viewable using the ESO Archive Science Portal.