GODZILLA NEBULA LOOKS LIKE A SPACE LIZARD
What do you see in this image of space gas and dust? Perhaps the greenish blob puts you in mind of a frog, a crocodile or even Slimer from Ghostbusters. One scientist is pretty sure he saw Godzilla. Much like clouds on Earth, space clouds can trigger pareidolia, the recognition of a face or familiar object in an ambiguous pattern. And the Godzilla nebula – which sort of looks like the space lizard, but potentially like any other number of objects – is a prime example of the phenomenon.
“I wasn’t looking for monsters,” said Caltech astronomer Robert Hurt, who catalogues images from NASA’S Spitzer Space Telescope. “I just happened to glance at a region of sky that I’ve browsed many times before, but never zoomed in on. Sometimes if you just crop an area differently, it brings out something that you didn’t see before. It was the eyes and mouth that roared ‘Godzilla’ to me.”
This space monster is actually in the constellation Sagittarius. The stars that make up Godzilla’s nose and eyes are within the Milky Way, though their distance from Earth isn’t known. The bright region to the lower left, which Hurt imagines as Godzilla’s outstretched claw, is a star-forming region called W33.