Archive for August, 2009
Young Stingray
Credit: Matt Bobrowsky (Orbital Sciences Corporation) and NASA
It may be a little fuzzy, but the Stingray Nebula is the youngest known planetary nebula. A ring of gas, shown in green, is expanding from the central star. A companion, diagonally above and to the left, is affecting the growth of the bubble causing other bridges and rings of gas to appear. The red curved lines is gas that is heated when the central star’s solar wind, which is blowing fast, hits the wall of the bubbles. The colors shown are actually the colors given off by the glowing red gases of nitrogen, green for oxygen and blue for hydrogen.
Butterfly Wings
Credit: Massimo Stiavelli (STScI), and NASA
This butterfly-wing shaped nebula is larger than the solar system. NGC 2346 shows the last gasp of a binary star system. The two stars at the center of the nebula are so close that they orbit each other every 16 days. They are so close together that even the huge and powerful Hubble Space Telescope cannot tell them apart. Astronomers believe that one of the stars grew to become a red giant and actually swallowed its partner. Then the two became even closer together before parts of the stars were thrown off into space. At first this star stuff made of gas and dust moved out in a bubble. But scientists think that one of the stars developed a fast solar wind causing the butterfly wings to form.
Red Spiders
Credit: Garrelt Mellema (Leiden University) et al., HST, ESA, NASA
What a tangled web. The Red Spider Nebula, caught in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image, is a two-lobed planetary nebula. Also called butterfly nebulas, these planetary nebula are what remains when a normal, Sun-like star reaches the end of its life. What is left becomes a white dwarf. The Red Spider Nebula, also called NGC 6537, houses one of the hottest white dwarfs astronomers have seen. The nebula is created when gas and dust blown out from the star, called a solar wind, collide with the walls of the nebula. The walls of the nebula aren’t moving as fast. When the two collide, the atoms in the cloud begin to glow. As for the strange shape, stars at the final stage of their life throw off gas and star material in waves and in all different directions.
Is it a Swan or Lobster?
Credit: NASA/JPL–Caltech/Univ. of Wisc.
Deep in the constellation Sagittarius, a cloud that looks like a swan is making new stars. The Swan Nebula is not a quiet nursery though as shown in this image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. It’s an active and tumbling cloud of gas and dust. Massive stars make up the center part of the star cloud. These stars force rivers of gas and dust to slam into the quiet outer regions creating twists and dark areas. Eventually, these dark pockets will form into new stars as well.
The Crab
Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University)
In the year 1054, Japanese, Chinese and Native American astronomers recorded a violent event. They saw a star that hadn’t been there before. It turned out to be a supernova that formed the Crab Nebula and it’s one of the earliest recorded astronomical events by humans.
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