Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/E. Churchwell (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and the GLIMPSE Team Black Widow Nebula Hiding in the Dust

In the constellation Circinus, where previous visible-light observations by the Digital Sky Survey (left) saw only a faint hourg lass-shaped patch of obscuring dust and gas, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope's dust-piercing eyes see a big "Black Widow Nebula" teeming with clusters of massive young stars (right).
In the Spitzer image, the two opposing bubbles are being formed in opposite directions by the powerful outflows from massive groups of forming stars. The baby stars can be seen as specks of yellow where the two bubbles overlap.
When individual stars form from molecular clouds of gas a…