Heart and Soul Nebulae

Green and red swirls of nebulae are seen over a field of bright blue stars with W3 glowing white. Two spectra are laid over the background image, one green, one red.

W3, one of the 25 Milky Way regions the HyGAL project will study, is seen as the glowing white area in the upper right of this image of the Heart and Soul Nebulae, taken by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). SOFIA looked at the abundances of six hydride molecules in W3, the spectra of two of which are shown in the box at left. Image credit: Nebulae: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA; Spectra: Jacob et al.