The Dark Energy Camera captured a stunning image of the “Hand of God,” a cosmic structure 1,300 light-years from Earth in the constellation Puppis. The camera is mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Inter-American Observatory Tololo from Chile, reports CNN.
Comet globules are a type of Bok globules or dark nebulae. These isolated cosmic clouds are full of dense gas and dust that are surrounded by hot, energetic material. Comet globules are unique because they have long tails like those seen on comets. Astronomers still don’t know how cometary globules come to exist in such distinct structures.
The new hand-like image shows CG 4, one of the many globular comets found in the Milky Way galaxy. The twisted cloud appears to be heading toward a spiral galaxy known as ESO 257-19 (PGC 21338). But the galaxy is more than 100 million light-years away from the cometary globe. CG 4 has a hand-like dusty main head measuring 1.5 light-years in diameter and a long tail spanning 8 light-years.
Astronomers first discovered cometary globules by accident in 1976 while looking at images captured by Britain’s Schmidt Telescope in Australia. These cosmic phenomena are difficult to observe because they are incredibly faint, and the tails of the globules are usually blocked by stellar dust.
How was it possible to photograph the phenomenon
But the Dark Energy Camera has a special filter that can detect the incredibly faint red glow emitted by ionized hydrogen, present in the outer rim and head of CG 4. Hydrogen produces such a telltale red glow only after being hit by radiation from stars massive and hot nearby.
Cometary globules can be found throughout the galaxy, but most are in the Gum Nebula, a cloud of incandescent gas thought to be the slowly expanding remnants of a stellar explosion about 1 million years ago. The Gum Nebula is thought to contain 31 cometary globules in addition to CG 4.
Astronomers believe there are several ways the globules could form their distinctive comet-like shapes. The globules could once have been round-shaped nebulae, such as the iconic Ring Nebula, that were destroyed over time. But cosmic phenomena can also be the result of winds and radiation released by nearby massive, hot stars.
Astronomers believe stars may be the underlying cause, as all cometary globules found in the Gum Nebula have tails pointing away from the nebula’s center. And at the center of the nebula is the remnant of the supernova, as well as a pulsar, or rapidly rotating neutron star that formed when a much larger star collapsed and exploded.
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