Astronomers have imaged a vast nebula resembling a cosmic bat in deep space, using a telescope in Chile. Located 10,000 light-years away, the structure glows red from newborn stars igniting gas and dust. The discovery highlights a stellar nursery between the constellations Circinus and Norma.
The image, captured by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO's) Paranal site in Chile's Atacama Desert, depicts a cloud of cosmic gas and dust shaped like a bat's silhouette. This "cosmic bat" spans an area of the sky roughly four times larger than a full Moon and appears to glide between the southern constellations of Circinus and Norma.
As a stellar nursery, the nebula is a massive region where new stars form. Young stars within it release energy that excites nearby hydrogen atoms, creating the brilliant red glow visible in the image. Dark, threadlike filaments, formed by dense, cooler clumps of gas containing tiny dust particles, block starlight from behind and outline the bat's "skeleton," producing shadowy features.
The brightest parts of the nebula include RCW 94, which shapes the bat's right wing, and RCW 95, forming its body. The remaining structure remains unnamed, contributing to the formation's mysterious allure.
The VST, owned and operated by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), is equipped with OmegaCAM, a 268-megapixel camera ideal for imaging large celestial regions. To produce the vivid portrait, astronomers combined visible light observations from the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+), which captured most of the red details, with infrared data from ESO's Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) via the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV) survey. These surveys are publicly available for further exploration.