The Dark Energy Camera’s newest image features the Corona Australis molecular cloud and its many stellar and gaseous features. The swirls of gas in the new image are reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.”
Corona Australis (CrA) is a dark nebula about 425 light years away. It’s one of the closest star-forming regions to Earth, and contains a handful of embedded nebulae. Though it’s not as well studied as other nearby star-forming regions like Orion and Ophiuchus.
The swirls of gas in the new image are reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.”
The binary star R Coronae Australis illuminates the orange cloud on the left, made up of a red dwarf and a pre-main-sequence star that has gathered its mass but hasn’t started hydrogen fusion yet.
Young bright stars like the primary in R Coronae Australis light up nearby reflection nebulae when their light reflects off of them. The same stars also emit powerful UV radiation that ionizes some of the gas surrounding them, creating an emission nebula. That nebula is named NGC 6729, or Caldwell 68. Its shape and its brightness vary due to the orbits of the binary star.
This image highlights some of the objects in the fascinating Corona Australis Molecular Cloud. Image Credit: Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA. Image processing: R. Colombari & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)
Newborn stars in Corona Australis light gas up and turn it blue. The stormy-looking region of beige and yellow is made up of the reflection nebulae NGC 6726 and NGC 6727. They extend to the image’s lower right, where they join with IC 4812, another reflection nebula.
The stunning NGC 6723, also known as the Chandelier Cluster, sits in the upper right. It’s much further away than Corona Australis, about 29,000 light years away, and contains hundreds of thousands of stars.
This image labels objects of interest in the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud, including multiple nebulae and Herbig-Haro objects. Image Credit: Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA. Image processing: R. Colombari & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)
Though other star-forming regions capture more scientific attention than Corona Australis, it hasn’t been ignored. Gaia has observed it, as has Chandra, XMM-Newton, and others. Altogether, research shows that Corona Australis is anything but static. A paper published in 2023 showed that the CrA complex is accelerating away from the Galactic plane. Those researchers calculated that two supernova explosions would’ve been needed to impart this kinetic energy.
This zoomed in image shows the unusual Herbig-Haro object HH100 on the left in detail, where a young star emits jets of ionized gas. It also highlights other stars and sections of gas cloud that appear almost wind-blown. Image Credit: Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA. Image processing: R. Colombari & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)
A 2025 paper divided the CrA complex into two subregions — a younger CrA-Main and an older CrA-North—and showed that they were once closer together but are actually moving further apart. Even the Herbig-Haro object in the above image is transient and will last only a few ten thousand years, almost nothing in astronomical time.
*This false-colour image of Corona Australis comes from the ESO’s Very Large Telescope. It shows the same Herbig-Haro object (HH100) as the zoomed-in image above. Image Credit: By ESO/Sergey Stepanenko – http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1109a/, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14636787*
Interested readers can download a high-res version of the image and explore more fascinating detail in this rich region on their own.
