A Chilean Telescope Meant To Find Dark Matter Takes Incredible Image Of Lobster Nebula Instead

India Times

There seems to be tons of news coming out of space lately, and that’s all because of the incredible technology made available to scientists in recent years.

In this case, a telescope called the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) was being used to survey the universe for dark energy when it happened upon the Lobster Nebula, taking the most detailed image of it too. It’s both beautiful and incredibly spooky all at once.

The Lobster nebula, which is said to be 8,000 light years away, can be found in the star forming region of the Scorpius constellation. This image, which released on September 12, measuring 400 light years across.

In the area, there are many bright young stars that are scattered all across the region that’s surrounded by quilts of gas and dust. But in the bright center happens to be an open star cluster that’s described as a very tightly packed group of very young and very huge stars.


Space.com’s Tereza Pultarova wrote, “Interstellar winds, galactic radiation, and powerful magnetic fields batter the nebula, squeezing the gas and dust inside into twisting streams and braids.”

In the scientists quest to search for dark energy, instead they stumbled on the Lobster nebula. This Dark Energy Camera is a device that’s mounted on top of the Víctor M. Blanco Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory located in Chile, and it was really designed to look for dark energy as a part of the Dark Energy Survey, which is an international project.

Dark energy is considered the cousin of dark matter, which happens to be another force in the universe that scientists have not been able to measure aside from its effects on observable matter.

While experts believe that dark energy makes up most of the matter in the universe, they also think that it’s responsible for the continuous and accelerating expansion of the universe as well. This observation was made partly due to their calculations made based precisely on its effects on visible matter.


However, dark matter is only believed to be a force that manages to keep the universe from expanding even faster. Moreover, it’s also used as the reason that the universe was said to be smaller before than it is today, based solely on calculations of its effect in a given environment.

This final image of the Lobster Nebula happens to show the multiple exposure levels that are layered on top of each other through different filters. Should the naked eye be able to see it at a brighter state, it would mostly probably look just like the image the telescope was able to capture.

If this doesn’t make you wonder what else lives out in the universe that has yet to be discovered, what will?

Take a look at the video below to see more on the image taken of the Lobster nebula.

 

 

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