Ominous 'Chamaeleon' is hiding a stellar secret: Space photo of the week
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
QUICK FACTS
What it is: The Chamaeleon I star-forming cloud
Where it is: 522 light-years away, in the constellations Chamaeleon, Apus, Musca, Carina and Octans
When it was shared: June 10, 2025
Stars form within dark molecular clouds of gas and dust called nebulae, but it's rare to capture these stellar nurseries clearly. A dramatic new image from the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) in Chile unveils the Chamaeleon I dark cloud — the closest such place to the solar system — in unprecedented detail.
The dark patches exposed in the new image give Chamaeleon I an ominous look, but within the thick veils of interstellar dust are pockets of light created by newly formed stars. Chamaeleon I is approximately 2 billion years old and is home to around 200 to 300 stars.
Those young stars, now emerging from swirling gaseous plumes, are lighting up three nebulae — Cederblad 110 (at the top of the image), the C-shaped Cederblad 111 (center) and the orange Chamaeleon Infrared Nebula (bottom). In astronomy, the word "nebula" is used to describe a diverse range of objects. It was initially used to describe anything fuzzy in the sky that wasn't a star or a planet, and it also refers to planetary nebulae, shells of gas ejected from dying stars.
Related: 28 gorgeous nebula photos that capture the beauty of the universe
However, these three are reflection nebulae, which glow brightly only because they're illuminated by starlight. That's in contrast to the famous Orion Nebula, which emits its own light because the intense radiation of stars within or near the nebula energizes its gas, according to NASA.
MORE SPACE PHOTOS
—James Webb telescope takes best look at 'Sombrero Galaxy' in 244 years
—Pink 'raindrops' on the sun captured in greatest detail ever
—Violent galaxies seen 'jousting' near the dawn of time
Chamaeleon I is just one part of the expansive Chamaeleon Cloud Complex — imaged in 2022 by the Hubble Space Telescope — which includes the smaller Chamaeleon II and III clouds. Chamaeleon I has been imaged many times before, most recently by the James Webb Space Telescope in 2023.
What makes this new image stand out is its spectacular detail. Mounted on the National Science Foundation's Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, DECam's 570-megapixel sensor reveals an intriguing faint red path of nebulosity between Cederblad 110 and Cederblad 111. Formed when streams of gas ejected by young stars collided with slower-moving clouds of gas, they're known as Herbig-Haro objects and are embedded throughout Chamaeleon I.
For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
WIRED
40 minutes ago
- WIRED
Scientists Are Sending Cannabis Seeds to Space
Jun 23, 2025 4:16 PM The versatile cannabis plant could, some scientists think, one day be useful for lunar and Martian colonists. For now, researchers will subject its seeds to radiation in orbit and see what happens. Photograph: Genoplant Research Institute On Monday, June 23, shortly after 9 pm UTC, hundreds of seeds, fungi, algae, and human DNA samples, many of which have never been exposed to space before, will make their maiden voyage aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, the mission is hoping to be the first to send plant tissues and seeds into a polar low Earth orbit and back, to allow scientists to study how biological systems are affected by the harsh levels of radiation found high above the Earth's poles. The information they glean, researchers hope, could one day help spacefarers grow crops on other planets. The samples will travel in a small biological incubator called MayaSat-1, developed by the Genoplant Research Institute, a Slovenian aerospace company specializing in space-based biological research. At an altitude above 500 km, the incubator, housed inside a larger capsule, will cross zones near the North and South poles where concentrations of charged particles emitted by the sun are high due to the Earth's magnetic field. When it passes through these regions, it will be exposed to up to 100 times more radiation than objects orbiting at similar altitudes around the equator, like the International Space Station (ISS). The capsule will orbit Earth three times, in a mission lasting around three hours, before re-entering the atmosphere and splash-landing in the Pacific Ocean. If all goes to plan, the incubator will be collected from a location around nine hours off the coast of Hawaii and shipped back to Europe, where the real exploration will begin. Among several research participants with samples aboard the mission is Božidar Radišič, who will be following the launch livestream closely from his office at the Research Nature Institute in Slovenia. The Martian Grow project, led by Radišič and his team, is sending approximately 150 cannabis seeds into space in MayaSat-1 to test their resilience and potentially accelerate their evolution. It's not a gimmick, though, or a quest for an otherworldly high. The incubator, called MayaSat-1 and seen here in a protective case, was developed by the Genoplant Research Institute, a Slovenian aerospace company specializing in orbital biological research. Photograph: Genoplant Research Institute Having dedicated much of his working life to studying the cannabis plant, Radišič believes it is uniquely qualified for space agriculture. It grows fast, adapts well, and has been an agricultural crop for thousands of years. According to Radišič, if at some point we want to grow life on Mars, this makes it an ideal candidate. 'Sooner or later, we will have lunar bases, and cannabis, with its versatility, is the ideal plant to supply those projects,' he tells WIRED. 'It can be a source of food, protein, building materials, textiles, hemp, plastic, and medicine. I don't think many other plants give us all these things.' Best known for producing the cannabinoids THC and CBD, Cannabis Sativa L. contains hundreds of different compounds, many of which are still being discovered and the effects of which we don't fully understand. What we do know is that it is a resilient plant, coping well with stressors such as UV light and radiation (such as gamma rays), which are used to aid in its cultivation here on Earth. It has also grown in climates from the highlands of Tibet to the jungles of Southeast Asia and the deserts of Afghanistan, and can be raised in controlled conditions. Gary Yates, a plant researcher and head of cultivation at Hilltop Leaf, a medical cannabis manufacturing facility in the UK, agrees that the versatility of cannabis makes it a 'leading contender' for a space crop. 'Its hardiness makes it perfect for an extreme environment,' he tells WIRED. 'It has shown great resilience and can grow in unexpected places. It doesn't demand too much water, is known to thrive in low-nutrient soil, and has demonstrated phytoremediation potential, for removing toxins and heavy metals from the ground.' Previous research has highlighted how conditions in space, such as microgravity and radiation, can influence plant genetics—and for Radišič, this is the key reason to send those cannabis seeds into orbit. 'The point is to explore how, and if, cosmic conditions affect cannabis genetics, and we may only find this out after several generations,' he says. According to D. Marshall Porterfield, professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University, who has been studying plant growth in space for several decades, the impact of radiation exposure on biological materials during space flight is 'well understood' through previous studies. 'It randomly causes mutations. Some of those mutations might turn up genes, they might turn down genes, they might knock out genes, they could disrupt whole signaling pathways,' he explains. 'As a result, you get variable responses in the biological materials that could lead to new genetically stabilized mutations that could then be identified and derived.' Radišič is not the first to query the effects of space travel on cannabis. A collaborative research team including a group that is based at the University of Colorado Boulder sent cannabis tissue cultures to the ISS in 2019. However, nothing has yet been published on how exposure to cosmic radiation and microgravity impacts the cannabis plant. He's also not the only researcher working to expose plants to higher radiation levels than previously studied. Porterfield, who is one of the scientists working on NASA's LEAF mission—a lunar plant-growth experiment that will go to the moon with Artemis III in 2027—says we know 'almost nothing' about the impact of radiation exposure beyond low Earth orbit. Understanding how variability in radiation impacts plants will be a 'critical focus' of the LEAF mission. 'We've been trapped in lower orbit for the last 30 years and haven't advanced a lot of the basic research that we need to go to deep space, where you find galactic cosmic radiation,' he says. 'There may be some unexpected responses from this variable source of radiation. Plant responses to these radiation issues are going to be important for future agricultural systems on the moon.' Once MayaSat-1 has returned, for the next two years Radišič and his team will work with the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia to breed generations of clones from the space seeds to study genetic changes and plant adaptations, including 'alterations in cannabinoid profiles'—how much CBD, THC, and other compounds the plants go onto develop. The second phase of their study will then involve simulating Martian soil conditions and growing plants in controlled low-gravity environments on Earth. Lumír Ondřej Hanuš, a chemist at Palacký University Olomouc in Czechia and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has been studying the cannabis plant since the 1970s. A research adviser on the project, he believes that there are 'many possibilities' for scientific investigation once the seeds have returned. As well as potential genetic and epigenetic changes, the Martian Grow team will look for structural and physiological changes, such as differences in leaf size, chlorophyll content, root architecture, photosynthetic rates, and water use. They will examine what happens after the plant is exposed to stressors such as disease, and analyze the activity of enzyme hormones and secondary metabolites, which could lead to the identification of new compounds. 'Whether there are changes or not, both results will be important for the future, so we know how to grow cannabis in the space environment,' Radišič adds. We're still some way off from actually growing cannabis on Mars, though, or any plant for that matter. Microgravity, extreme temperatures, lack of nutrients, and toxins in the soil do not make favorable conditions for cultivation. 'We will have to adapt to the environment on Mars, and slowly adapt our plants for them to survive,' says Petra Knaus, the CEO of Genoplant. 'For now, we believe it will only be possible [to grow plants] in a closed system container with the conditions adapted.' For future missions, Genoplant is developing a new space capsule in this vein, scheduled for its first reentry test in 2027, that will enable researchers to grow seeds in space and monitor them for several years. While cannabis could potentially be a supercrop for the space age, back on Earth, it is still predominantly thought of as a recreational drug (albeit one widely used for medicinal purposes), which has prevented regulators and researchers from fully acknowledging its scientific potential. Hanuš is optimistic that the findings from the project, whatever they look like, could dispel some of this stigma and speed up its scientific acceptance. 'If interesting results are published, it could speed up our understanding of cannabis,' he says. 'It is a very important plant, which I think has a big future if humanity ever crosses into space and starts life on another planet.'
Fast Company
an hour ago
- Fast Company
Vera Rubin Observatory reveals jaw-dropping first images from world's largest telescope
This morning, the world's largest telescope revealed its first-ever images of space—and they're pretty jaw-dropping. The images come courtesy of the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a scientific facility funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. Located at the summit of Cerro Pachón in Chile, the facility is the product of more than 20 years of work. Its space camera—embedded in the hulking Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) —is about the size of a small car and includes a sensor array of three billion pixels, the most sensors ever used in a telescope camera. According to a press release from the Rubin Observatory, it's expected to generate an 'ultrawide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of the Universe.' 'It will bring the sky to life with a treasure trove of billions of scientific discoveries,' the release reads. 'The images will reveal asteroids and comets, pulsating stars, supernova explosions, far-off galaxies and perhaps cosmic phenomena that no one has seen before.' 'The most efficient Solar System discovery machine ever built' In just its first 10-hour test observation, unveiled today, the LSST managed to capture images which include millions of galaxies and Milky Way stars, as well as more than 2,000 never-before-seen asteroids within our Solar System. Taken together, the photos illustrate a technicolor view of space at a mind-boggling scale—but the 10 million galaxies photographed by the LSST represent only 0.05% of the roughly 20 billion galaxies that the camera is expected to record within the next decade. The primary goal of the LSST is to complete a 10-year survey of the Southern hemisphere sky, capturing hundreds of images and around 20 terabytes of data per night throughout that period. Per the Rubin Observatory, this massive influx of data will make the LSST 'the most efficient and effective Solar System discovery machine ever built.' All of the captured data will be made available online, allowing astronomers across the globe to access countless new findings without physical access to the telescope. The LSST is designed to advance four main areas of study: Understanding the nature of dark matter and dark energy; creating an inventory of the Solar System; mapping the Milky Way; and exploring the transient optical sky, i.e. studying objects that move or change in brightness. Experts predict that, given its capacity to identify millions of unseen asteroids, comets, and interstellar objects, the camera could even help protect the planet by spotting objects on a trajectory toward the Earth or Moon. 'NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory will capture more information about our Universe than all optical telescopes throughout history combined,' Brian Stone, chief of staff at the National Science Foundation, said in a press release. 'Through this remarkable scientific facility, we will explore many cosmic mysteries, including the dark matter and dark energy that permeate the Universe.'
Wall Street Journal
an hour ago
- Wall Street Journal
TNB Tech Minute: Main Street Banks Could Get Opening to Join Stablecoin Market - Tech News Briefing
Full Transcript This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated. Speaker 1: Here's your TNB Tech minute for Monday, June 23rd. I'm Victoria Craig for the Wall Street Journal. Main Street banks worried about getting left behind by the push into crypto might soon get an opening. The Journal exclusively reports that financial technology giant Fiserv has plans to launch a stablecoin and platform that can be used by clients including 3,000 regional and community banks. A broad shift to crypto would put deposits at those more local banks at risk, because they're reliant on those deposits to make loans. If customers were to pull deposits and put the funds into stablecoins, it would leave those banks less room to lend and squeeze a critical revenue source. Elsewhere, German auto parts company Continental said today it's partnering with semiconductor maker GlobalFoundries to design its own vehicle computer chips. The new organization called Advanced Electronics & Semiconductor Solutions will design and test chips tailored for automotive products of its spinoff, Aumovio. Continental said the new unit will reduce geopolitical risk and make the company more self-reliant. And finally, a US-funded space observatory perched in the Andes mountains in Chile released its first images of deep space using the world's largest digital camera. It's the first time a telescope has been able to peer this far and wide into the cosmos. And for the next 10 years, the observatory will take photos of the southern sky at 30-second intervals every three to four nights. Scientists hope the project called The Legacy Survey of Space and Time will inventory the solar system, map the Milky Way, catalog billions of transient space objects, and unlock the mysteries of dark matter and energy. For a deeper dive into what's happening in tech, check out Tuesday's Tech News Briefing podcast.
