A cotton candy nebula glows in Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s first close-up image: Space photo of the week

This week, researchers revealed the long-awaited debut images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. Among its first batch — alongside one of the most detailed snapshots of space ever taken — was this spectacular image of the Trifid Nebula, also known as Messier 20. The stunning image from the world’s largest digital camera showcases the colorful object at its best.

A cloud of gas and dust, the Trifid Nebula is three things at once, hence its name (“trifid” means split into three parts). The pink is an emission nebula, a diffuse cloud of ionized gas that emits its own light, according to NASA. The blue is a reflection nebula, a cloud of gas and dust that scatters the light of nearby stars, much like a streetlight surrounded by fog. The dark regions of the image are dark nebulas and dust lanes that split the object into three parts, creating an intricate web of dust and star clusters.