LONDON: Blossoming like a giant cosmic rose, Messier 17 is a stellar factory where new stars are born.
The nebula, which goes by many names including Omega Nebula, the Swan Nebula, the Checkmark Nebula, the Horseshoe Nebula and the Lobster Nebula, is located 5,500 light years away.
Messier 17 is located in the constellation Sagittarius, which sits towards the centre of the Milky Way as illustrated in our video below.
The new image above shows a landscape of twisting molecular gas and dust clouds spanning 15 light-years across the sky.
The clouds have some 30,000 times the mass of the Sun, and act as stellar nurseries fuelling the formation of hundreds of hot young stars.
The centre of Messier 17 alone contains over 800 stars.
Many nascent stars are still hidden, buried deep inside the nebula’s veil of dense clouds.
Other stars have drifted into view and are now helping to light up the surrounding nebula with intense ultraviolet light which ionises the surrounding hydrogen gas, causing it to glow pink and red.
The whiter regions in the nebula are the result of the mixing of light from hot gas with starlight reflected by surrounding dust.
The web of darker regions that look like holes in the nebula are dense clouds of thick unlit dust that obscure visible light, but shine brightly at infrared wavelengths.
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