The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) has captured an ominous and ghostly hand reaching from the Milky Way from a distant edge-on spiral galaxy. But don’t panic; despite its nickname, “God’s Hand,” there is nothing supernatural about this structure — yet that doesn’t make it any less awe-inspiring.God’s Hand is actually a cometary globule officially known as CG 4. It is located around 1,300 light-years from Earth within our Milky Way galaxy and seen in the constellation Puppis. Cometary globules are a hard-to-detect subclass of so-called Bok globules, which are isolated and dense clouds of gas and dust surrounded by hot, ionized material.Despite their name, cometary globules have nothing to do with comets. The moniker actually comes from the fact that these nebulas have had material dragged away from them, creating a long tail that resembles the characteristic tail of a comet.Related: Dark Energy Camera captures record-breaking image of a dead star’s scattered remains a pink and red cloud of dust in deep spaceCometary globules remain somewhat mysterious because the cause of their structure hasn’t yet been definitively determined. Scientists hypothesize that the structure of cometary globules could be created by stellar winds that flow from the hot, massive stars surrounding them, or from the supernovas that occur when these stars die.Reach for the skies!CG 4’s distinctive tail, which helps define it as a cometary nebula, is an 8 light-year-long faint tendril of gas and dust with a 1.5 light-year-wide tip. This feature is stunningly apparent in the images from the DECam, an instrument located on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, which is located at an altitude of 7,200 feet (2,200 meters) above Chile. Images like this one may finally help crack the mystery of cometary globule and Bok nebula creation.Bok clusters weren’t discovered by astronomers until the mid-1970s, evading detection for so long because of how faint they are and the fact that their tails are shrouded by stellar dust that prevents light from passing through i …
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[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnThe Dark Energy Camera (DECam) has captured an ominous and ghostly hand reaching from the Milky Way from a distant edge-on spiral galaxy. But don’t panic; despite its nickname, “God’s Hand,” there is nothing supernatural about this structure — yet that doesn’t make it any less awe-inspiring.God’s Hand is actually a cometary globule officially known as CG 4. It is located around 1,300 light-years from Earth within our Milky Way galaxy and seen in the constellation Puppis. Cometary globules are a hard-to-detect subclass of so-called Bok globules, which are isolated and dense clouds of gas and dust surrounded by hot, ionized material.Despite their name, cometary globules have nothing to do with comets. The moniker actually comes from the fact that these nebulas have had material dragged away from them, creating a long tail that resembles the characteristic tail of a comet.Related: Dark Energy Camera captures record-breaking image of a dead star’s scattered remains a pink and red cloud of dust in deep spaceCometary globules remain somewhat mysterious because the cause of their structure hasn’t yet been definitively determined. Scientists hypothesize that the structure of cometary globules could be created by stellar winds that flow from the hot, massive stars surrounding them, or from the supernovas that occur when these stars die.Reach for the skies!CG 4’s distinctive tail, which helps define it as a cometary nebula, is an 8 light-year-long faint tendril of gas and dust with a 1.5 light-year-wide tip. This feature is stunningly apparent in the images from the DECam, an instrument located on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, which is located at an altitude of 7,200 feet (2,200 meters) above Chile. Images like this one may finally help crack the mystery of cometary globule and Bok nebula creation.Bok clusters weren’t discovered by astronomers until the mid-1970s, evading detection for so long because of how faint they are and the fact that their tails are shrouded by stellar dust that prevents light from passing through i …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
