4 JANUARY 2022
Interstellar wildfire
© ESO
The Flame Nebula burns bright in this striking radio image. In the central rectangle, the Flame Nebula is on the left; the smaller feature on the right is reflection nebula NGC 2023. If you look closely, to the top right of NGC 2023 you can see the Horsehead Nebula rising from the ‘flames’. These are all part of the Orion Cloud, a large gas structure 1,300 to 1,600 light years from Earth. The different colours of the gas indicate the velocity at which it’s travelling away from us. The red clouds in the background are moving faster than the yellow clouds. The image in the rectangle is from observations conducted with the SuperCam instrument on the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) on Chile’s Chajnantor Plateau. The background image was taken in infrared light using the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.