Distant cosmic dust tendril imaged

MUNICH, Germany, Feb. 15 (UPI) -- European astronomers say they've imaged a vast tentacle of cosmic dust, spanning light years, containing newborn stars normally invisible to optical telescopes.

They used a high-tech radio telescope in Chile operated by the European Southern Observatory to photograph the object known as the Taurus cloud filament, Space.com reported Wednesday.

The dust tendril, 10 light years across, consists of two parts called Barnard 211 and Barnard 213, named for an early 20th-century astronomer named Edward Emerson Barnard who took photographs of similar cosmic dust bands.

"In visible light, these regions appear as dark lanes, lacking in stars. Barnard correctly argued that this appearance was due to 'obscuring matter in space,'" officials said Wednesday in a release from ESO's headquarters in Munich, Germany.

"We know today that these dark markings are actually clouds of interstellar gas and dust grains [that] absorb visible light, blocking our view of the rich star field behind the clouds."

The Taurus cloud, about 450 million light years from Earth, appears dark to visible-light telescopes because its dust is extremely cold, with an average temperature of around minus 441 Fahrenheit.

Radio telescopes can image it at millimeter or submillimeter wavelengths that are up to 1,000 times longer than those of visible light, the astronomers said.