Swimming Frog

Credit: NASA and The Hub­ble Her­itage Team (STScI/AURA)

Call it a galac­tic dust bunny. Or a frog swim­ming in a bright, pink pond.

Deep in space, dust and dust col­lect into knots called Bok glob­ules. Named after astronomer Bart Bok, these globs are places where new stars will prob­a­bly form. We find these dense knots of mate­r­ial all over the Milky Way Galaxy. This swim­ming frog is being lit from behind by nearby emis­sion neb­ula NGC 281. The glob­ules show up nicely against the lumi­nous pink hydro­gen gas clouds of the neb­ula. The hydro­gen gas in the neb­ula is heated and ener­gized by stars nearby in a process called ion­iza­tion. The ion­iza­tion of these clouds causes them to glow.

NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope took this image in 2005. NGC 281 is found nearly 9,500 light years away toward the con­stel­la­tion of Cas­siopeia, the Queen.