NASA photographed a giant "space butterfly", which is actually a butterfly-like nebula and a star birth area in the Milky Way, which has bred hundreds of stars.
NASA took pictures of the W40 nebula, which looks like butterflies in space.
The red nebula, westerhout 40 (W40 for short), is made up of massive clouds and dust 1,400 light-years from the sun. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured infrared images of it.
The two wings of this nebula are bubbles formed by scorching interstellar gas from a cluster of the region's hottest and most massive stars. One of the hottest and most massive stars is W40 IRS 1a, which is located near the center of the cluster.
W40 and orion nebula are about the same distance from the Sun, but the two are almost 180 degrees opposite in the sky. These two nebulae are the two closest regions with giant stars, whose massive stars have more than 10 times more massive than the Sun's mass, and scientists have been observing such stars forming.
In addition to being good-looking, W40 can also serve as an example of how star formation can lead to the disappearance of the clouds that helped it form.
In the vast clouds of gas and dust in space, gravity pulls matter into dense clumps. Sometimes, these clumps reach a critical density, causing the star to form in its core.
Radiation and stellar winds from massive stars in these gas clouds, combined with the material they spew out when the stars eventually explode, sometimes form bubbles like those within W40. But these processes also cause clouds of gas and dust to disappear, breaking up dense clumps, and reducing or halting the formation of new stars.
In the NASA image, there is a cluster called Serpens south in the upper right corner of W40. Both the Serpent South and the clusters within W40 are only a few million years old and are still very young in astronomical terms, and the Serpent South is the youngest of the two. It will one day form bubbles like those inside the W40.
Here's a look at the photos taken from other universes:
The European Southern Observatory captured images of the NGC 1788 Nebula, which resembled flying bats.
NASA photographed the Abel 370 galaxy cluster.