There's an ominous, cloudy structure that looks a lot like a ghostly hand reaching across the cosmos. Located in the constellation of Puppis about 1,300 light years away from Earth in our Milky Way Galaxy, the dark, dusty structure dubbed CG 4 is known as a cometary globule and has been aptly nicknamed 'God's Hand." It was recently imaged by the Dark Energy Camera, which is mounted on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. 

In a rare new image, the twisting, glowing red CG4 appears to be stretching out toward a defenseless-looking spiral galaxy known as ESO 257-19 (PGC 21338). However, the galaxy is actually more than a hundred million light years away from CG4 and only appears to be close due to a chance alignment, according to the NSF NOIRLab. The dusty head of CG4, which resembles a hand, has a diameter of 1.5 light-years and its long, faint tail is about eight light-years long. Like most cometary globules, CG4 is a relatively small Bok globule. 

Cometary globules are a type of Bok globule, or dark nebula. These isolated clouds of dense cosmic gas and dust are surrounded by hot, ionized material. When these clouds strip material, they appear to have an extended tail resembling the shape of a comet. They can be found across our galaxy, most commonly in the Gum Nebula. Astronomers don't fully understand how cometary globules are created in such distinct shapes, especially since it is difficult for them to detect the faint clouds. 

It's not the first time a space object resembling a hand has been spotted by astronomers. In October, NASA X-ray space telescopes revealed the remains of a dead star that resembled a skeleton hand. The structure is formally known as MSH 15-52 and is located 16,000 light-years from Earth.