Pareidolia is the scientific name for the human tendency to perceive a specific, often significant image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern. This is what has happened to Robert Hurt, a Caltech astronomer who is responsible for the vast majority of public images created from Spitzer data since the observatory’s launch in 2003.
“I was not looking for monsters,” he said in a statement. “By chance, I looked at a region of the sky that I had surveyed many times before, but never gotten close. Sometimes, if you just crop an area differently, it brings out something that I didn’t see before. It was the eyes and mouth that they roared ‘Godzilla’. ” Hurt refers to a cloud of gas and dust captured by NASA’s Spitzer telescope, it has been dubbed the Godzilla nebula for the similarities of the bright spots to the features of the well-known monster.
Attractive images that help us understand the universe
Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the Spitzer spacecraft retired in January 2020, but scientists continue to mine its huge dataset in search of new information about the universe. And Hurt continues to search for attractive images.
“It’s one of the ways we want people to connect with the incredible work that Spitzer did,” he said. ” I look for attractive areas that can really tell a story. Sometimes it’s a story about how stars and planets form, and sometimes it’s about a giant monster sweeping through Tokyo.”
The Godzilla-like nebula is located in the constellation Sagittarius, along the plane of the Milky Way, which was part of Spitzer’s GLIMPSE survey (short for Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire ). The stars in the upper right (where this cosmic Godzilla’s eyes and snout would be) are at an unknown distance from Earth but within our galaxy. Located about 7,800 light years from Earth, the bright region in the lower left (Godzilla’s right hand) is known as W33.
Over billions of years, countless stars have formed in the material there. During their lifetime, the radiation they release cuts through the gas and dust, reshaping the cloud. Major changes also occur when massive stars die and explode, becoming supernovae. When viewed in visible light, the kind of human eyes that can detect, this region is almost completely obscured by clouds of dust. But infrared light – wavelengths longer than our eyes can perceive – can penetrate clouds, revealing hidden regions like this one.
Four colors (blue, cyan, green, and red) are used to represent different wavelengths of infrared light; yellow and white are combinations of these wavelengths. Blue and cyan represent wavelengths emitted mainly by stars; dust and organic molecules called hydrocarbons appear green; and hot dust that has been heated by stars or supernovae appears red.
Hurt isn’t the only one who tends to see Earth-bound objects in images of the cosmos. Other scientists have spied a black widow spider, a Halloween pumpkin, a snake, an exposed human brain, and the Enterprise spacecraft, among other things, in Spitzer images.
