On a clear night in Chile, a 570-megapixel camera attached to a telescope atop a mountain pointed at the sky and captured something remarkable: a swirling, star-studded scene so beautiful it reminds scientists of Vincent van Gogh's famous painting The Starry Night.
The Dark Energy Camera, known as DECam, took this new image of the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud, a region where new stars are being born right now. The picture shows glowing orange clouds, clusters of stars, and wisps of blue gas spread across a patch of sky that looks almost painterly.
What makes this image so special? For one thing, the cloud it shows is remarkably close to home. The Corona Australis Molecular Cloud sits just 430 light-years from Earth—practically next door in cosmic terms. That's close enough for astronomers to study star formation in fine detail. On the left side of the image, you can see the bright nebula NGC 6729, while on the right, the globular star cluster NGC 6723 twinkles like a jeweled chandelier.
Embedded in the glowing cloud is a pair of stars called R Coronae Australis. These two stars orbit each other in a slow cosmic dance that takes 43 to 47 years to complete one loop. One of those stars is still in its cosmic childhood, not yet fully "grown up." In 2019, astronomers confirmed that its partner is a red dwarf, a small, cool type of star that can shine for trillions of years.
The new image is popular with amateur astronomers because the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud and the Chandelier Cluster are both visible in the same region of sky. For those in the southern United States or farther south, summer is the best time to look for the constellation Corona Australis—Latin for "Southern Crown"—near the horizon.
This artwork from the cosmos was taken using DECam, which is mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation's Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The camera has 74 detectors and a lens nearly a meter wide, giving it the power to pick up faint details across vast distances.
Looking at this image, it's easy to see why astronomers keep coming back to this corner of the sky. It's a place where stars are being born, where old clusters of stars shine in the distance, and where the universe puts on a show that rivals anything hanging in an art museum.