It's holiday season in space too! See the beautiful running-chicken-like nebula

It's the holiday season on Earth and space alike! European Southern Observatory (ESO) recently shared a picture of a majestic nebula shaped like a running chicken, giving the vibe of a holiday in space. They literally named it Running Chicken Nebula which “spans an area in the sky of about 25 full moons”, said the ESO press release.

The holiday special nebula was captured in a 1.5 billion pixel resolution by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) that is hosted at ESO’s Paranal site in Chile.

ESO captured Running Chicken Nebula

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The special Running Chicken Nebula is located in the constellation Centaurus (the Centaur), which is 6500 light-years from Earth, as per ESO. The stars that comprise this nebula are quite young and emit intense radiation that makes the surrounding hydrogen glow in shades of pink. The pinkish hue of the nebula makes it unbelievably spectacular to look at.

Take a detailed look:

The brightest region within this nebula is called IC 2948, where some people located a silhouette of a chicken’s head and others its rear end. Apart from the pinkish hue, the pastel contours seen in the image are made up of plumes of gas and dust.

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At the centre of the nebula is IC 2944, which is a bright, vertical almost pillar-like structure. The brightest twinkle in this particular region is Lambda Centauri, a star visible to the naked eye that is much closer to us than the nebula itself.

Other regions in the picture include- Gum 39 and 40, to the upper right and Gum 41, to the lower right. Aside from the nebulae, there are countless stars of orange, white and blue colours arranged in an assorted mosaic.

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But what makes the nebula look like a chicken? Well, it is the presence of these innumerable stars that are all bright and pretty but are certainly not merry. These stars emit vast amounts of radiation that carve out of the spatial environment a chicken-like shape. Some regions of the nebula, known as Bok globules can withstand this fierce bombardment of stars, leaving a void in between the chicken-like silhouette.

The observations were made with the wide-field camera OmegaCAM mounted on the VST. As per ESO, the image is 270 light-years wide and it would take an average chicken almost 21 billion years to run across it. This time is much longer than our universe has been around for.

(With inputs from agencies)