Nebular Swirl

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

A swirl of neb­ula resem­bles an arm and a hand in this image of DG 129 from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Sur­vey Explorer, or WISE.

Dive into this col­or­ful reflec­tion neb­ula. Gaze at the star cloud with your imag­i­na­tion. What other pat­terns or sto­ries do you see? Leave a note below.

In vis­i­ble light, DG 129 is not remark­able. But with WISE’s infrared eyes, the reflec­tion nebula’s full glory is revealed. Reflec­tion neb­ula reflect faint starlight from nearby stars. In com­par­i­son, emis­sion neb­ula, such as the Great Neb­ula in Orion, shine with their own light as ultra­vi­o­let radi­a­tion from nearby stars excites hydro­gen atoms, caus­ing them to glow.

Just to the right of the “thumb” in the hand, look for Pi Scor­pii. The bright star, wrapped in the green­ish haze, is one of the stars that marks the claws of Scor­pio, the Scor­pion. This triple-star sys­tem lies about 500 light-years from Earth about the same dis­tance away as DG 129.

The WISE orbit­ing tele­scope sur­veyed the sky from Decem­ber 2010 until it was turned off in Feb­ru­ary 2011. To view the uni­verse in infrared wave­lengths, the satellite’s sen­sors had to be kept very cold. Coolant needed to keep it cool ran out and the satel­lite stopped send­ing use­ful data.