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Red Spider Nebula
A celestial creepy-crawly
A spider with 3-light-year-long legs seems like awfully bad news for arachnophobes, but if you're one of the 6% of Earth's population afflicted with fear of spiders, rest assured that the Red Spider Nebula can't get you. Big as this bug is, it's also far away – a nice, safe distance of roughly 5,000 light years. And the legs? Just massive, bubble-like dust clouds inflated by gases that billow from the central white dwarf. Appropriately, this spidery shot was captured by NASA's Webb Telescope, whose Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) makes finely detailed imaging possible from astronomical distances.
A celestial creepy-crawly
A spider with 3-light-year-long legs seems like awfully bad news for arachnophobes, but if you're one of the 6% of Earth's population afflicted with fear of spiders, rest assured that the Red Spider Nebula can't get you. Big as this bug is, it's also far away – a nice, safe distance of roughly 5,000 light years. And the legs? Just massive, bubble-like dust clouds inflated by gases that billow from the central white dwarf. Appropriately, this spidery shot was captured by NASA's Webb Telescope, whose Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) makes finely detailed imaging possible from astronomical distances.
© ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. H. Kast 2026-09-11 08:45:52 :