Take a look at the eerie photo just released by NASA, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The picture is of the nebula known as IRAS 05437+2502, and boy does that vast, wispy, ghost-like cloud look creepy! But what makes it mysterious is that astronomers currently have no idea what the source is of the light that’s making the nebula glow.
Captured by the Wide Field Channel of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, the image actually contains a relatively narrow field of view as the nebula itself isn’t very big. Not much is known about it outside of the fact that it’s in the constellation Taurus and it wears a mysterious glowing hat atop its head. One hypothesis suggests a massive star that since accelerated to a high velocity and departed the nebula spawned the glowing matter long ago, though there’s no evidence to speak of to confirm or deny that theory.
The air of mystery surrounding such a stunning image is all right by us. Get a higher-res image for your desktop here.
Source: Popular Science.
