The NASA Spitzer Space Telescope has sent back a stunning image of a dust and gas cloud located thousands of light-years away.
Just like clouds in Earth’s atmosphere, nebulae or clouds of gas and dust in space can sometimes resemble familiar objects or even characters from movies.
The new image released by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on October 25 depicts a giant nebula in the constellation Sagittarius and evokes the image of the monster king Godzilla, a fictional creature that has appeared in many blockbuster films from Japan and Hollywood.
Nebula resembling Godzilla in the constellation Sagittarius. (Image: NASA JPL)
With a bit of imagination, one can see the clusters of stars and the gas and dust clouds in the upper right of the image forming the eye and snout of Godzilla, while the bright area in the lower left corner represents the creature’s right arm. This bright region is a “star nursery” known as W33, located about 7,800 light-years away from us.
When viewed in visible light, W33 is almost completely obscured by dust clouds. However, its infrared light—wavelengths longer than what the human eye can perceive—can penetrate through the clouds and stands out prominently in observations made by the Spitzer Space Telescope.
In this image, blue, cyan, green, and red colors are used to represent different wavelengths of infrared light; yellow and white are combinations of those wavelengths. Blue and cyan represent wavelengths emitted by stars. Dust and organic molecules known as hydrocarbons appear green, while red represents dust heated by stars or supernovae.
As massive stars collapse and explode into supernovae, they reshape the surrounding regions of space. This intense event also compresses material together, leading to the birth of new stars.
The Spitzer Space Telescope has been “retired” since January 2020, but astronomers continue to mine its vast dataset for new insights about the universe.
