The surprising truth about the image of 'ghost butterfly' flying through space was captured by the observatory

A spectacular image of a ghostly butterfly made of light has just been released by an observatory located in Chile, dubbed the Chamaeleon Infrared Nebula.

The mysterious structure looks like a butterfly's wings slanting across the universe, with its head shining brightly and wings as thin as dew. According to a statement from NSF NOIRLab, it is a beautiful and fierce birth of a star.

It was NSF NOIRLab's Gemini International Observatory, located in Chile, that captured this once-in-a-lifetime moment.

Beautiful image of a ghost butterfly flying through space

According to Science Alert, stars are inherently intense objects, and so are their births. They form from freezing points between molecular clouds, when gas and dust collapse, spinning under the gravity of the newborn stars themselves.

This would form an intense "vortex", where surrounding matter is sucked into the protostar's accretion disk, giving the star enough material to grow. As the protostar grows, it begins to create strong stellar winds, and the matter falling into the protostar begins to interact with its own magnetic field, blasting into space powerful jets of plasma, which is the mechanism that creates butterfly wings. ghost in the universe.

In this image, the star is lurking in the very narrow black band between the "butterfly" and the fainter image opposite, which looks like the butterfly's reflection in a mirror.

The reason Chamaeleon is called an infrared nebula is because this ghostly butterfly glows in infrared images but cannot be seen with the naked eye.