The Universe isn’t short of things that amaze us.
It feels like we’re currently in a golden age of astronomy, with the James Webb Space Telescope seemingly making a new discovery or releasing a new image every week.
And the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has just released its first images, promising to get astronomers closer to uncovering the secrets of dark matter and dark energy than ever before.
This wonderful image was captured by another of the current best telescopes in the world, the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.
It shows the Fighting Dragons of Ara, also known by its formal designation NGC 6188, a cosmic cloud that looks, well, like two dragons fighting.
This is an emission nebula, which means it’s a cloud of gas and dust that’s illuminated because of a powerful star – or stars – ionizing the gas, causing it to glow.
Fighting Dragons of Ara is located 4,000 lightyears from Earth close to the edge of a large molecular cloud in the constellation Ara (the Altar), visible in the Southern Hemisphere.
Like all of the many nebulae that look like animals, the resemblance is, of course, a coincidence.
It’s an example of pareidolia, when the human brain sees patterns or familiar objects in what are actually completely random arrangements.
The Fighting Dragons of Ara look like two dragons facing one another.
The ‘dragon’s are made up of thick, dark dust clouds that appear black, but also lighter dust clouds that glow in red due to ionized hydrogen, caused by the energetic outflows from hot, young stars.
These young stars are only a few million years old, which is very young in cosmic terms. For comparison, our own host star, the Sun, is 4.6 billion years old.
Of these young stars, 27 form the open star cluster NGC 6193, which can be seen in the upper portion of the image, left of the centreline.
This star cluster is beaming a background glow that further defines the outline of the dragons.
What’s more, these young stars are emitting intense stellar winds, sculpting and shaping the gas and dust into the dragon shapes that see in the image.