It is about 1,300 light years away, in the constellation of Puppis. It emerges from the interstellar medium and extends into the cosmos. The hand of God nebula is in a striking image obtained by the Dark Energy Camera at the Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile.
According to NASA, it is the cometary cluster known by the acronym CG 4. It is a cloudy and ominous structure that is also known by the nickname “the hand of God.” It is one of the many cometary clusters present in the Milky Way.
Undetected
Cometary globules are a subclass of dark nebulae known as Bok globules. These are isolated clouds of dense cosmic gas and dust. A detachment of material usually occurs there, resulting in a tail that extends through space. They are known as cometary globules because of their vague resemblance to a comet. But they have nothing in common.
For a long time, cometary globules went undetected by astronomers. They are very faint objects. Their tails, shrouded in dark stardust, block most of the light from passing through. Today you can see the faint red glow of ionized hydrogen.
These structures appear throughout the Milky Way. But most of them, including CG 4, are located inside a huge blob of incandescent gas called the Gum Nebula. It contains at least 31 cometary globules in addition to CG 4. This nebula is believed to be nothing more than the expanding remains of a supernova. It happened about a million years ago.
Theories of its formation
The mechanism by which these comet-like objects acquire their characteristic shape is not well understood. There are two main theories about its origins. The first is that, at first, they could have corresponded to spherical nebulae, such as the Ring Nebula. And they were subsequently affected by a nearby supernova explosion.
The second idea says that they are formed by a combination of stellar winds and radiation pressure. All cometary globules found within the Gum Nebula appear to have tails that sweep away from the center of the nebula with the hand of God. A certainly beautiful and exotic image.
