ESO has released an image of a cat-like nebula; do you see too

Last Tuesday (27), a team of scientists from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) released a new discovery about the Sh2-284 nebula, an orange and red cloud presented in a stunningly detailed image. The region is known as the ‘breadbasket’ of star formation and is therefore full of young stars..

According to a statement from scientists, the “star brushstrokes” in the image resemble a cat’s facean effect caused by pareidolia, a psychological phenomenon that leads people to recognize faces and shapes in different types of visual objects.

“This stunning image of Nebula SH2-284 was taken by the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory. SH2-284 is a star forming region with a cluster of young stars at its center called Dolidze 25. If you look at the cloud as a whole, there you can see the face of a smiling cat in the sky. ”, is described in the announcement about the discovery.

The building blocks of new stars are emerging in nebulae like Sh2-284, so the data could help unravel the mysteries of star formation. A young star cluster known as Dolidze 25 can be seen just below the ‘cat’s nose’.. The area is known to produce large amounts of radiation and wind; The radiation is so strong that it ionizes the nebula’s hydrogen gas and produces the beautiful orange and red hues visible in the image.

cat-faced nebula

star nursery About 15,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of the Unicorn, also known as the Unicorn.. The image captures the brightest part of Sh2-284, a patch of dust and gas about 150 light-years across.

As the scientists explain, stellar winds push gas and dust away from the center of the nebula, but when they encounter pockets of denser material, the winds erode the areas around the nursery. It is precisely this process that is responsible for creating the ‘pillars’ of gas and dust seen in the image that form new stars.

“This image was created using data from the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), owned by the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) and hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. VST is dedicated to mapping the southern sky in visible light and leverages a 256-million-pixel camera specially designed to capture very wide-area images,” the team concludes.