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See the stunning, star-forming Lobster Nebula in Dark Energy Camera image

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One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology today is what exactly the universe is made up of. We know that all of the ordinary matter in the universe makes up just 5% of the total universe, with the rest being made up of theoretical constructs: 27% of the universe is dark matter, and 68% is dark energy. We know that dark matter and dark energy must exist because we see their effects, but neither has ever been measured directly.

So to learn more about dark energy, an international large-scale survey called the Dark Energy Survey was launched to map out hundreds of millions of galaxies. Between 2013 and 2019 a collaboration of researchers used a purpose-built tool called the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Victor M. Blanco Telescope located in the Chilean Andes for these observations. But since the survey has come to an end, the Dark Energy Camera hasn’t been idle — it’s now used for research into a variety of astronomical topics, and it was recently used to capture this stunning image of the Lobster Nebula.

The star-forming nebula NGC 6357, known as the Lobster Nebula.
This image, taken by astronomers using the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, captures the star-forming nebula NGC 6357, which is located 8000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Scorpius. This image reveals bright, young stars surrounded by billowing clouds of dust and gas inside NGC 6357, which is also known as the Lobster Nebula. CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), J. Miller (Gemini Observatory/NSF’s NOIRLab), M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)

This 400-light-year-wide nebula is located around 8,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius. This cloud of dust and gas is illuminated by bright, young stars, with a particularly bright set of massive stars in a cluster called Pismis 24 in the heart of the nebula. The interactions of these massive stars, the younger stars forming around them, and the clumps of dust and gas which will eventually form another generation of stars all add to the complex, billowing shape of the nebula.

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Capturing these different features was possible thanks to the Dark Energy Camera’s range of filters. “This image was constructed using some of a new range of very special DECam narrowband filters, which isolate very specific wavelengths of light,” NOIRLab explains. “They make it possible to infer the physics of distant objects, including important details about their inner motions, temperatures, and complex chemistry, which is especially important when examining star-forming regions like the Lobster Nebula.”

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Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
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