What’s in a nebula’s name?

Do you see a playful fox, a skulking hyena or… a chicken’s head? Located in the Centaurus constellation, this gas cloud is part of the giant Running Chicken Nebula. Some people see it as the head of the chicken, others see the chicken’s rear end.

But as much as scientists love fun names for nebulae, they are often not very conducive to clear communication in an international field like astronomy. That is why this nebula is formally known by two names that sound, well… a little less funky.

In 1955, Australian astronomer Colin Stanley Gum made an inventory of 84 emission nebulae in the southern sky: the Gum catalog. This one is known, quite dryly, as Gum 40. Long before Gum, in 1888, Danish astronomer John Louis Emil Dreyer had already compiled the ambitious New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars (NGC), an index of 7840 astronomical objects such as galaxies, star clusters and emission nebulae like this one. Dreyer later added two Index Catalogues (IC) to his work, describing another 5386 celestial objects. This nebula was labelled IC 2872. The NGC is still used today: it got its most recent update in 2019, with 13 957 new objects.

This image of IC 2872 — or Gum 40, the chicken head or whatever nickname you might wish to give it — was captured by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. As telescopes and instruments keep getting better, more and more deep-sky objects are discovered, so the lists and catalogues will never be complete. But that shouldn't keep us from trying to compile them — or making up fun nicknames, right?