A Dark Tower in the Sky, Seen from a Desert #SpaceSaturday
Out in the Atacama Desert you can find the VLT Survey Telescope (VST). On an arid plateau sitting at over 8,000 feet above sea level, the VST peers up at celestial bodies that do not have to compete with the light of civilization. And from the desert, astronomers found an image of a dark tower in the sky. Here’s more form Astronomy Now:
This eerie, dark silhouette is a cometary globule designated GN 16.43.7.01. Despite their name, cometary globules have nothing to do with comets, beyond having a similar shape to a dusty head with a tail. Cometary globules are a variation of Bok globules, which are isolated pockets of dense, dark dust and gas inside which conditions are ripe for star formation. In the case of this cometary globule, winds of radiation from a group of luminous stars just out of shot are sculpting the Bok globule into a tail-like shape. Whereas Bok globules were discovered by the Dutch–American astronomer Bart Bok in the 1940s, their cometary globule variation was first seen only as recently as 1976.
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