Black Widow

Credit: NASA/JPL–Caltech/E. Church­well (Uni­ver­sity of Wisconsin-Madison) and the GLIMPSE Team

A cos­mic spider-shaped neb­ula hides in a dark cor­ner of space. Astronomers look­ing toward the con­stel­la­tion Circi­nus with earth-based tele­scopes saw only a fuzzy, hourglass-shaped patch of light. But when they turned the dust-piercing, infrared light gath­er­ing NASA’s Spitzer Space Tele­scope at this spot in the sky, they dis­cov­ered a neb­ula bloom­ing with clus­ters of mas­sive young stars. Astronomers called it the “Black Widow Neb­ula.”

Explore the image. Two bub­bles are being formed in oppo­site direc­tions as strong winds and radi­a­tion forces gas and dust to flow out­ward from the new stars. This cre­ates a cav­ity, or bub­ble, within the cloud. The baby stars are seen as yel­low specks in the cen­ter of the image.

The Black Widow Neb­ula lies about 10,000 light-years from Earth toward the small, south­ern con­stel­la­tion Circi­nus, the com­pass. Circi­nus lies next to the ancient con­stel­la­tion Cen­tau­rus, the Cen­taur. Astronomer Nico­las Louis de Lacaille intro­duced the con­stel­la­tion in the 18th cen­tury. He named many of the con­stel­la­tions he described after sci­en­tific instru­ments. Circi­nus is a Latin word and refers to the class­room tool used for draw­ing circles.