DNA strand in Nebula
How cool is this.
"Nobody has ever seen anything like that before in the cosmic realm," said Mark Morris of the University of California, Los Angeles.
Most nebulae are "formless, amorphous conglomerations of dust and gas," Morris said in a statement, adding that this one "indicates a high degree of order."
The discovery of the twisted nebula, which stretches across 80 light-years at the center of the Milky Way, the galaxy that includes Earth, was reported in the current edition of the journal Nature.
A light-year is about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers), the distance light travels in a year.
