New telescope images expose ghostly ‘God’s Hand’ in Milky Way reaching across the universe

What seems to be a ghostly hand reaching across the universe toward an unguarded spiral galaxy in a new telescope image is a rarely seen celestial phenomenon, according to astronomers.The Dark Energy Camera took a spectacular image of “God’s Hand,” a cometary globule 1,300 light-years away from us in the Puppis constellation. The camera is mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope present at Chile based Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.

Cometary globules are a kind of Bok globule, or dark nebula. These isolated celestial clouds are filled with dense gas and dust, which are enclosed by hot, energetic material. Cometary globules are distinctive because they have extended tails, like those seen on comets — but that’s the only cometlike thing about them.

Astronomers are still unaware how cometary globules come to exist in such distinctive structures. Historically, it’s also been tough for scientists to detect the faint clouds.The new pic of the glowing red hand-like feature shows CG 4, one of the many cometary globules found across our galaxy. The twisting cloud seems to be reaching for a spiral galaxy named ESO 257-19 (PGC 21338). But the galaxy is over 100 million light-years away from the cometary globule.

CG 4 has a chief dusty head, which looks like a hand, that measures 1.5 light-years across, and it has a lengthy tail that stretches for 8 light-years. A light-year is the distance light covers in one year, which is 9.46 trillion kilometers (5.88 trillion miles).

A surprising cosmic discovery

Astronomers first discovered cometary globules accidentally in 1976 while viewing images captured by the UK Schmidt Telescope in Australia. These celestial phenomena are tough to spot because they’re very faint, and the tails of globules are normally blocked from view by stellar dust.But the Dark Energy Camera has an exceptional filter that can detect the extremely dim red glow released by ionized hydrogen, which is present in the head and outer rim of CG 4. Hydrogen only yields such a telltale red glow after being hit with radiation from proximate hot, massive stars.

While stellar radiation grants visibility to the cometary globule, it also destroys the globule’s head over time. Nevertheless, there is enough gas and dust within the globule to assist in the birth of several stars the size of our sun.Cometary globules can be sighted across our galaxy, but most are present in the Gum Nebula (a glowing cloud of gas alleged to be the slowly expanding remains of a stellar explosion from about 1 million years ago). The Gum Nebula is alleged to contain 31 cometary globules in addition to CG 4.