A stunning new image from has been nicknamed the Space Butterfly for its two 'wings' of hot gasses either side of a central cluster of stars.
The butterfly is a nebula, a giant cloud of gas and dust in space where new stars are born, and was spotted by NASA.
It is officially called Westerhout 40 (W40) and is 1,400 light-years from the sun, harbouring hundreds of baby stars.
The nebula's two 'wings' are giant bubbles of hot, interstellar gas blowing from the hottest, most massive stars in the region.
The latest picture comes from the Spitzer Space Telescope and is a composite of four infrared images.
Nasa has revealed an image of the space butterfly, a giant cloud of gas and dust in which new stars form. It is officially the W40 and is 1,400 light-years from the Sun, harbouring hundreds of baby stars. The picture is composed of four images taken with Nasa's Spitzer telescope
Nasa has called the W40 nebula a 'nursery' for hundreds of baby stars.
The red butterfly's wings are made of matter that has been ejected from the thick cluster of stars in the middle of the wings.
Nasa said in a blog post about the image:'W40 is about 1,400 light-years from the Sun, about the same distance as the well-known Orion nebula, although the two are almost 180 degrees apart in the sky.
'They are two of the nearest regions in which massive stars - with masses upwards of 10 times that of the Sun - have been observed to be forming.
'The hottest and biggest of these stars that lie in the middle, the W40 IRS 1a, is found near the center of the star cluster.'
The Spitzer Space Telescope (pictured), formerly known as the Space Infrared Telescope Facility is an infrared telescope that studies the early universe, young galaxies and forming stars. It was launched into orbit around the sun and trails behind Earth on August 25, 2003
The resulting mosaic image was released as part of the MYStIX (Massive Young stellar clusters Study in Infrared and X-rays) survey of young stellar objects run by Nasa.
The Spitzer Space Telescope, formerly known as the Space Infrared Telescope Facility is an infrared telescope that studies the early universe, young galaxies and forming stars.
It was was launched into orbit around the sun and trails behind Earth, on August 25, 2003 and is primarily used to detect dust spreads around stars.
The Spitzer mission is the fourth and final observatory under NASA's Great Observatories program, which also includes the Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.
OK, so what? It's 1,400 light years away and NASA is making definitive statements about it, as if they really knew. Who cares? NASA is a welfare program for scientists and engineers. It is a colossal misuse of money and technical resources. We have plenty of problems on this planet that are far more deserving of attention.
ReplyDeleteAnybody remember epicycles? They were in style a while ago, and served to explain the geocentric solar system. Epicycles went out of style with the advent of the heliocentric system. That was a paradigm shift. The data didn't fit the old model and Occam's Razor came into play. Similar circumstances face us today. Can we handle a new paradigm shift? For a view on Astrophysics from plasma physicists, please see www.thunderbolts.info. Thanks!
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