Astronomers using ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope in Chile have captured a new view deep inside the Lagoon Nebula, also known as Messier 8 or NGC 6523.
This image, taken with the VLT Survey Telescope, shows the Lagoon Nebula. Image credit: ESO / VPHAS+ team.
The Lagoon Nebula is a giant cloud of interstellar gas and dust located in the constellation Sagittarius, around 5,700 light-years away.
It has an apparent visual magnitude of 6 and its angular diameter is 90 x 40 arc-minutes, which translates to 110 by 50 light-years at the estimated distance of the nebula.
The Lagoon Nebula is creating intensely bright young stars, and is home to young stellar clusters.
This new image is from the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), one of two dedicated survey telescopes at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in northern Chile.
The telescope was not pointed at the nebula deliberately, it simply was included as part of a huge imaging survey called VPHAS+ that covered a much larger region of the Milky Way. VPHAS+ is just one of three imaging surveys using visible light with the VST. These are complemented by six infrared surveys with the VISTA survey telescope.
The surveys are addressing many important questions in modern astronomy. These include the nature of dark energy, searching for brilliant quasars in the early Universe, probing the structure of the Milky Way and looking for unusual and hidden objects, studying the neighboring Magellanic Clouds in great detail, and many other topics.
As well as the nine imaging surveys with VISTA and the VST there are also two additional surveys that are in progress using other ESO telescopes.
One, the Gaia-ESO Survey, is using the Very Large Telescope at Paranal to map the properties of more than 100,000 stars in the Milky Way, and another – PESSTO – is following up on transient objects such as supernovae using the New Technology Telescope at La Silla.
