The Sprouting of Beauty
Looking more like a painting than an astronomy photograph, the Omega nebula glows with vivid colors in this new image from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. This is one of the sharpest and most detailed images of this object ever taken from a ground-based telescope.The nebula — located around 6,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius — is thought to be a hotbed of recent star formation. The cloud of gas and dust spans approximately 15 light-years and is estimated to contain enough material to produce 800 sun-like stars.
