Photo of the day: a magnificent nebula under the “fire” of space lasers
The European Southern Observatory (ESO, European Southern Observatory) has presented a mesmerizing image in which an object in the starry sky seems to be under fire from devastating space weapons.
In particular, the image shows a pinkish mass and four bright laser beams. This picture is suggestive of Star Wars, but in fact, this is how one of the instruments of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile works.
The pinkish structure represents the Carina Nebula. It is a giant cloud of dust and gas about 7,500 light-years away in the constellation Carina.
In this area, there are a large number of luminaries – both newborns and those completing their life cycle. Here, for example, is located Eta Carinae, a double hypergiant star with a combined luminosity of more than 5 million times that of the Sun.
As for the bright stripes in the photo, they are formed by the adaptive optics system. It sends laser beams into the atmosphere, where they excite sodium atoms, making them glow. This creates “artificial stars” that can be used to measure the atmospheric distortion of wavefronts from real stars and then correct them with optical elements.
