Leaping Fish

Credit: NASA, ESA and Orsola De Marco (Mac­quarie University)

Strange shapes, leap­ing fish and pin­cers can be found in the col­or­ful sea of gas and dust amid bright blue stars in the star-forming region of NGC 2467.

Explore this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope. Leave a com­ment below and share what you see in this image.

NGC 2467 is sim­i­lar to the famous Orion Neb­ula, or M42. These glow­ing regions of dense clouds of gas and dust are nurs­eries for new stars. The hot, young blue stars, born from the cloud, send out streams of ultra­vi­o­let radi­a­tion. This radi­a­tion excites hydro­gen atoms in the cloud and causes them to glow. At the bot­tom, the stars’ strong stel­lar wind shapes the cloud, push­ing the gas and dust into pil­lars and knots of mate­r­ial. Through­out the neb­ula, we can see globs of dark mate­r­ial called Bok glob­ules. Stars may be grow­ing in these inky black dust balls.

NGC 2467 lies about 17,000 light-years from Earth toward the south­ern con­stel­la­tion Pup­pis, the Poop Deck. Pup­pis once belonged to the larger con­stel­la­tion known as Argo Navis, the ship used by Jason and the Arg­onauts in Greek mythology.