The Very Large Telescope (VLT), a telescope facility operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, has observed an active star-forming region called NGC 2467.
This vivid picture of NGC 2467 was captured with the FORS2 instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Image credit: ESO.
NGC 2467 is located in the southern constellation of Puppis, approximately 17,000 light-years away from Earth.
Popularly known as the Skull and Crossbones Nebula, this star-forming region has an age of just a few million years.
“It is easy to see the motivation for the nickname Skull and Crossbones,” ESO astronomers said.
“This young, bright formation distinctly resembles an ominous hollow face, of which only the gaping mouth is visible here.”
“NGC 2467 skulks in the constellation Puppis, which translates rather unromantically as The Poop Deck.”
Like the famous Orion Nebula, NGC 2467 is a huge cloud of gas (mostly hydrogen) that serves as an incubator for new stars.
“NGC 2467 is the birthplace of many stars, where an excess of hydrogen gas provided the raw material for stellar creation,” the scientists said.
“It is not, in fact, a single nebula, and its constituent stellar cluster are moving at different velocities.”
“It is only a fortuitous alignment along the line of sight from the Earth that makes the stars and gas form a humanoid face.”
“This luminous image might not tell us anything new, but it provides us all with a glimpse into the churning southern skies, bright with wonders invisible to the human eye.”
The image was captured with VLT’s FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph 2 (FORS2).
It was created as part of the ESO Cosmic Gems program, an outreach initiative to produce images of interesting, intriguing or visually attractive objects using ESO telescopes, for the purposes of education and public outreach.
The program makes use of telescope time that cannot be used for science observations.
All data collected may also be suitable for scientific purposes, and are made available to astronomers through ESO’s science archive.
