See a stunning star cluster in an enormous 80-million-pixel image

By Georgina Torbet Published February 13, 2025

A stunning image of star cluster RCW 38 has been captured by a telescope in Chile, showing glorious detail of the object located 5,500 light-years away. Located in the constellation of Vela, this star cluster is bursting with dust and gas, making it fertile ground for the birth of new stars.

The cluster holds around 2,000 stars, most of which are far younger than our sun and are therefore more active. Many of the dots of color are created by these young, hot stars which give off large amounts of radiations that causes the dust around them to glow brightly.

You can find a huge version of the image here, which allows you to zoom in and see the many details captured in this remarkable data.

“The picture was taken with ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), operating in Chile’s Atacama Desert,” the European Southern Observatory (ESO) explains. “It shows a mixture of gas, dust and stars, creating an extravagant, yet spectacular landscape. As VISTA observes infrared light, it is able to peer through most of the dust in this region, which would block our view when observing in visible light. Behind the dust, VISTA is showing young stars within dusty cocoons and cold ‘failed’ stars known as brown dwarfs, thus revealing the secrets within these young stellar nurseries.”

As well as the infrared image, ESO also shared an image of the same cluster but captured in the visible light range, which is the same portion of the spectrum that our eyes can see. As dust is opaque in visible light, and there is a great deal of dust in this cluster, most of the details of its structure are hidden. There’s also a slider that lets you flick between the two images to compare them.

The infrared image was taken as part of a survey by the VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) telescope. That same telescope recently produced the most detailed infrared map to date of the Milky Way, showing some of the wonders of our own galaxy that are visible in the infrared portion of the spectrum. Space telescopes like James Webb also have instruments operating in the infrared, allowing them to peer through dust clouds and to track potentially dangerous asteroids.