Space photo of the week: Hot young suns glow blue, white and orange in the Lobster Nebula

What it is: NGC 6357, a diffuse emission nebula

Where it is: 8,000 light-years away, in the Scorpius constellation.

When it was shared: Sept. 26, 2024

Why it's so special: NGC 6357, also called the Lobster Nebula, is busy giving birth to huge stars. This massive star-forming complex's dense core — which stretches across 400 light-years — is a tangle of dust tendrils surrounding hot young stars and glowing clouds of gas, so much so that it's impossible to see what's going on inside the stellar nursery with an optical telescope.

The stunning image, initially taken in 2013 and available as a zoomable version, was revealed this week as one piece of a jigsaw that took 200,000 separate pictures and 13 years to compile — the biggest-ever infrared map of the Milky Way galaxy.

Infrared-sensitive cameras are critical in revealing what's happening in deep-sky objects like NGC 6357. To take the images that would make up the vast Vía Láctea (VVV) survey, astronomers used the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) survey telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory, located in Chile’s Atacama desert. The VVV survey’s goal was to scan the Milky Way to discover its structure and thus explain how it formed.

Related: 38 jaw-dropping James Webb Space Telescope images