Just in time for Halloween, astronomers have discovered a giant, ghostly “bat” soaring across the Milky Way.
Using the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal site in Chile, scientists captured a breathtaking image of a vast cloud of gas and dust that looks uncannily like the silhouette of a bat with outstretched wings.
This enormous “cosmic bat” lies about 10,000 light-years away between the southern constellations of Circinus and Norma.
It covers an area of the sky roughly four times the size of the full Moon, and its glowing red “body” seems to be chasing a bright patch of light above it, almost like a creature hunting in the dark of space.
In reality, the bat is a stellar nursery—a region where new stars are being born. These young, hot stars pump out so much energy that they make the surrounding hydrogen gas glow a deep, fiery red.
The darker, web-like filaments inside the nebula form the “bones” of the bat’s wings, made of dense clouds of gas and dust that block the light from background stars. These colder regions are also where future stars may form.
The bat’s “right wing” corresponds to a star-forming region known as RCW 94, while its “body” is RCW 95.
Together, they belong to a large catalog of bright, active nebulae found in the southern sky. The rest of the bat’s shape, while clearly visible in the image, does not yet have an official name.
The image was taken with the VLT Survey Telescope, which is operated by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and hosted at ESO’s observatory in the Atacama Desert—one of the best stargazing locations on Earth. The telescope’s OmegaCAM, a powerful 268-megapixel camera, allows astronomers to capture wide, detailed views of huge stretches of the night sky.
To create this haunting image, researchers combined data from several filters that detect different colors of light. Most of the nebula’s red glow was captured in visible light through the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+).
Additional infrared observations from another ESO telescope, the VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy), added depth and color to the densest parts of the nebula as part of the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV) survey.
Both surveys are publicly available, offering anyone the chance to explore the Milky Way’s hidden beauty. For now, the “cosmic bat” reminds us that even in the vast darkness of space, nature has a way of painting spooky surprises.
Source: ESO.
