A stunning image resembling a ghostly butterfly made of light has just been released by an observatory located in Chile, named the Chamaeleon Infrared Nebula.
This mysterious structure looks like a butterfly gliding through the universe, with a brilliant bright head and wings as thin as mist. According to a statement from NSF NOIRLab, this represents the beautiful and violent birth of a star.
It was the International Gemini Observatory of NSF NOIRLab, located in Chile, that captured this once-in-a-thousand-years moment.
Stunning image of a ghostly butterfly flying through the universe – (Photo: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA)
According to Science Alert, stars are indeed high-intensity objects, and their birth is no different. They form from dense points within molecular clouds, where gas and dust collapse and spin under the gravitational pull of the newly formed stars.
This creates a fierce “vortex”, where surrounding material is drawn into the protostar’s accretion disk, providing the star with enough material to grow. As the protostar increases in size, it begins to generate strong stellar winds, and the material falling into the protostar starts to interact with its own magnetic field, blowing powerful plasma rays into space, which is the mechanism that creates the ghostly butterfly wings in the universe.
In this image, the star is hidden in the narrow black band between the “butterfly” and the fainter image on the opposite side, resembling a reflection of the butterfly in a mirror.
The reason Chamaeleon is called an infrared nebula is that this ghostly butterfly shines in infrared images and cannot be seen with the naked eye.
