This Nebula Isn’t Your Typical Space Blob

Cosmic nebulae usually look like blobs in space, but astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope reported Wednesday that they had found a nebula twisted like the double helix of DNA.

“Nobody has ever seen anything like that before in the cosmic realm,” said astronomer Mark Morris of UCLA.

Most nebulae are “formless, amorphous conglomerations of dust and gas,” he said in a statement, adding that this one “indicates a high degree of order.”

The discovery of the twisted nebula, which stretches 80 light-years at the center of the Milky Way, the galaxy that includes Earth, was reported in the current edition of the journal Nature.

“We see two intertwining strands wrapped around each other as in a DNA molecule,” said Morris, lead author of the report.

The strands of the nebula may be torqued by twisted magnetic fields at the Milky Way’s center, Morris said.

The magnetic fields are indirectly spawned by the gaping black hole at the galactic heart, he said. Black holes are massive matter-sucking drains in space, pulling in everything around them so powerfully that not even light can escape.

But before the matter falls into the black hole, it swirls around its edges. This rotation twists the magnetic fields, which in turn twist the nebula’s strands, Morris said.

The nebula is relatively close to the black hole, 300 light-years away. Earth is more than 25,000 light-years away.