NASA’s photo of ‘space butterfly’ full of baby stars goes viral, netizens left speechless

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which is the official space agency of the US, is known to share images and snippets of outer space on the social media handles, which often leave us more educated and sometimes stunned by what lies beyond the Earth.

Well, NASA has done it once again with an image shared from outer space, which is not going viral on social media. The space agency has shared an image of a potential site where new stars might be formed – but the image resembles a butterfly in space!

Sharing the image with the caption “a beautiful space butterfly”, NASA also explained that the site in outer space contains many baby stars. The image shows a massive red butterfly wing-shaped area in outer space, with glittering stars on the inside.

Explaining the science behind the viral photo, NASA said that it is an infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the space butterfly is a nebula, which is a giant cloud of gas and dust in space where new stars may form.

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by NASA (@nasa)

The space agency said that the two “wings” in the photo of the ‘space butterfly’ are giant bubbles of hot, interstellar gas blowing from the hottest, most massive stars in this region.

NASA further explained in the caption, “Besides being beautiful, this nebula demonstrates how the formation of stars results in the destruction of the very clouds that helped create them. Inside giant clouds of gas and dust in space, the force of gravity pulls material together into dense clumps. Sometimes these clumps reach a critical density that allows stars to form at their cores.”

“Another cluster of stars, named Serpens South, can be seen to the upper right of the butterfly in this image. Although both Serpens South and the cluster at the heart of the pictured nebula are young in astronomical terms (less than a few million years old), Serpens South is the younger of the two,” the space agency further said.

Netizens were left impressed with the beauty and details of the image, with one user saying “Aww its beautiful” and another user saying, “I wanna get lost in that space butterfly, can I please?”

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