Cocktail Astronomy | Stellar Snow Angel

Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Here at Future-ish, we love astronomy and we love cocktails. So to prep our fans (and ourselves) for those stellar weekend cocktail conversations, we are pleased to offer our Cocktail Astronomy post each Friday.

For this week's Cocktail Astronomy, we're all about the Holidays. With Justin Bieber holiday songs playing in the background, we'll be raising a our eggnog, hot spiced wine, and other favorite holiday cocktails to Sharpless 2-106, or S106 for short, that just so happens to look like a cosmic snow angel. Located in the constellation Cygnus, S106 is over 2,000 light years from Earth and is the 106th object to be catalogued by astronomer Stewart Sharpless in the 1950. The image above was taken by Hubble in February 2011 and shows the birth of a massive star, IRS 4 (Infrared Source 4) to be exact. Hot gasses create the wings of the angel and a ring of and gas orbiting the star serve as a belt.