Spitzer’s View Of Nebula W40

What looks like a red butterfly in space is in reality a nursery for hundreds of baby stars, revealed in this infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

Officially named W40, the butterfly is a nebula – a giant cloud of gas and dust in space where new stars may form. The butterfly’s “wings” are giant bubbles of hot, interstellar gas blowing from the hottest, most massive stars in this region.

The material that forms W40’s wings was ejected from a dense cluster of stars that lies between the wings in the image. The hottest, most massive of these stars, W40 IRS 1a, lies near the center of the star cluster.

W40 is about 1,400 light-years from the Sun, about the same distance as the well-known Orion nebula, although the two are almost 180 degrees apart in the sky.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Larger image