Behold a Cosmic Cloud of Spooky Black Smoke

It’s often said where there’s smoke, there’s fire — but the only “fire” here is the reddish glow from vast clouds of ionized hydrogen, set alight by the powerful UV radiation pouring out of nearby hot young stars.

The image above shows just a small part of a huge glowing cloud of hydrogen called Gum 15, located 3,000 light-years away in the southern constellation Vela. The dark areas snaking across it aren’t really smoke but rather lanes of opaque interstellar dust, sculpted by stellar wind and silhouetted against the brightly ionized hydrogen beyond.

This image was taken as part of the ESO Cosmic Gems program with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.

The nebula was discovered in 1951 by a young Australian astronomer named Colin Gum, who included it and many others in a now-famous catalog of HII emission nebulae published in 1955. The talented and well-liked Gum suffered a tragic death at the young age of 36 in a skiing accident while vacationing in Switzerland in 1960.

Today, this and 84 other emission nebulae bear his name along with a crater on the moon.

From Discovery News