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Four orange laser beams blaze across the Milky Way as an angry purple nebula pierces us with its deadly gaze. Fortunately (or sadly, depending on how much news you’ve consumed this week), Land he is not condemned; in fact, it’s a terrestrial telescope that fires lasers in this epic image from the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
Nicknamed ESO’s Image of the Week, this shot looks like a cosmic battle to the death, but it actually captures a clever astronomical trick that scientists use to peer across time and space. The purple star system pictured here is the Carina Nebula, sometimes called And Carinae nebula in honor of its most famous star system. Eta Carinae – actually a pair of two giant stars – has been steadily exploding in a spectacular eruption of gas and dust for nearly 200 years. Although the system is at around 7,500 light years from Earth, this continuous explosion made it one of the brightest star systems in the Milky Way.
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Seeing that far into space can be tricky, even looking at one of the brightest objects in our galaxy through one of the most powerful telescopes on Earth (in this case, ESO’s Very Large Telescope, located in Chile). An annoying problem: Earth’s gaseous atmosphere always intrudes, blurring and distorting the view of celestial objects.
This is where lasers come in. According to ESO, scientists fire these lasers from one of the components of the Very Large Telescope to simulate distant stars. (Sodium particles in the atmosphere cause orange rays to glow.) Astronomers then focus on these artificial stars to measure how much the rays are blurred by the Earth’s atmosphere. By practicing with false stars, astronomers can more effectively calibrate the telescope to correct atmospheric blur when observing real stars, galaxies and explosive objects such as Eta Carinae, according to ESO.
So, to sum it up: Earth scientists are actively firing lasers in the heart of an exploding star system, but only then can they get to know it better. In our weird and beautiful Milky Way, it’s just the neighborhood thing to do.
Originally published in Live Science.
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