NEW YORK: The “God’s Hand” space globule, a cluster of dust and cold gas around 1,300 light years distant, was captured in breathtaking photographic form by the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory.
God’s Hand, more officially known as CG4, resembles a large, claw-like hand reaching out into the cosmos. The mechanics behind how God’s Hand formed are well known, but astrophysicists are still unsure of exactly how these collections of cold gas end up churning out brand new stars as they’re known to do.
The name cometary globule does not refer to what some may think – they have nothing to do with comets. A cometary globule nebula is a type of nebula. This nebula stems from a Bok globule. A Bok globule is known as a very dense, very compact, and very cold nebula. These stellar bodies are the smallest known type of dark nebulae. The Hand of God nebula and other similar to it are only one or two light-years across. The nucleus of the nebula can vary between two and one hundred solar masses.
Usually, the nebula is very faint. It is 1,300 light-years beyond Earth, located in the Puppis Constellation. The reason why astronomers can detect and capture great photos of this nebula is because it is illuminated by other stars in the background and the remnant of the Vela supernova.
The Hand of God nebula and other nebulae of the same type are very hard to detect. Since they are considered dark nebulae, they emanate no light and only appear as small, dark sections in the sky. Though, since they are considered cold on the stellar temperature spectrum, that does not mean they are dead masses. Even some of the coldest bodies in the Universe have a warm, radiating core that has the ability to give birth to one or multiple stars.
The new photo was captured by the monstrous telescope at the European Southern Observatory. This is the first time astronomers were able to see nearly minute details of the Hand of God. They stated that the head of the globule resembles a yawning divide for a mouth. They were also able to determine that the mouth is 1.5 light-years across and the tail of the globule trails to eight light-years behind.
Hongjun An, an astronomer at the McGill University in Montreal, Canada, stated that he and other astronomers are still guessing whether or not the “hand” part of the nebula is an optical illusion. This was voiced in a statement from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR). They also discovered that the star in the middle has a diameter of only 12 miles and spins at a velocity of seven times per second.
