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| Foto: CTIO/NOIRLAB/NSF |
NEWSLINE PAPER,- Astronomers managed to capture a nebula that looked like a giant hand made of dust and gas stretching out into space. The sight is about 1,300 light-years away from our solar system. The nebula is in the constellation Puppis, showing a giant ghost hand that seems to be bending towards the ESO 257-19 spiral galaxy. (PGC 21338).
According to researchers at the NSF NOIRLab (U.S. National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory), this dusty structure called CG 4 is actually a comet globule that happens to look like a hand.
Comet globules are one group of giant outer space objects called Bok globules, small and dark nebulae made of clouds of compact gas and dust. These are areas where stars often form in outer space, mostly consisting of hydrogen, carbon oxide, and helium, and have masses between 2 and 50 times the mass of the Sun.
Bottom globules are usually surrounded by hot, ionized gas and dust, sometimes beginning to spread to form traces that look like a comet's tail. This type of block globules is known as comet fragments, first discovered in 1976.
CG 4 itself is about 1.5 light years in diameter with a tail length of 8 light years, making it a relatively small bok globules. How exactly the particles of the comet acquired their strange shape is still unclear. Some scientists suspect the details may have originated from a spherical nebula crashed by a nearby supernova.
Another hypothesis suggests that they were formed by star winds from large nearby stars or other objects.
CG 4, along with 31 other comet fragments, is located in the Gum Nebula in the middle of which are the Vela Supernova Remnant and Vela Pulsar.
This CG4 image was captured by the Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Camera (DECam) installed on the 4 meter Victor M. Blanco Telescope of the US National Science Foundation at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. (CTIO).
This light is generated when the hydrogen gas is hot enough, which indicates there are large stars and heat in the clouds.
Astronomers argue that CG 4 contains gas to give birth to several stars the size of the Sun, although the radiation released by this young star slowly scratches the top of the sphere.
Editor : Wahyu Fatih