[Cet article a initialement été publié le 14 mai 2024]
An intriguing “hand of God”
At the end of October, NASA celebrated Halloween in its own way by publishing the image of a “ghostly cosmic hand”. It was actually a neutron star, the remains of a giant star which collapsed on itself after consuming its nuclear fuel. This time, it is not a skeletal hand that arises from the cosmos but a “hand of God”.
Observed using the instrument tracking the black energy of the Víctor M. Blanco telescope of the interamerician observatory of Cerro Tololo in Chile, it is actually the obscure nebula CG4 which is in the constellation of the stern, about 1,300 light years of the earth. This rare and mysterious celestial phenomenon is also a bok globule, a cloud of dust and interstellar gas surrounded by hot and ionized matter which gives birth to stars.
A cosmic phenomenon difficult to detect
CG4 is special in this that one of its ends takes the form of a comet tail which evokes a hand. It is actually a pareidolia effect, a mental process that leads us to see familiar motifs in a landscape under the effect of visual or auditory stimuli. To prolong this illusion, the “hand of God” seems to want to grasp the spiral galaxy ESO 257-19 (PGC 21338) which is actually more than 100 million light years from the obscure nebula.
© © CTIO/Noirlab/Doe/NSF/AURE
Dark nebulae
Dark nebulae is difficult to detect due to their low light. The first observations date only from 1976. ” The way these clouds that are difficult to detect acquire their distinctive structure is not yet clear, but astronomers assume that this is a consequence of the hot and massive stars that surround them », Can we read in the NSF Noirlab press release, the American research and development center for optical and infrared night astronomy.
Some astronomers believe that these cosmic clouds are shaped by stellar winds from massive hot stars nearby. Others suggest that these could be spherical nebulae who have been distorted a supernova. Although they are present throughout the Milky Way, the vast majority of dark nebulae are found in the stern nebula which hosts at least 32 with CG4.
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