Anthill

Image Credit: NASA, ESA and The Hub­ble Her­itage Team (STScI/AURA)
Acknowl­edg­ment: R. Sahai (Jet Propul­sion Lab) and B. Bal­ick (Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton)

The Hub­ble Space Tele­scope shows us another exam­ple of how our Sun might die in 5 bil­lion years. The “Ant Neb­ula, ” or Men­zel 3, shows two glow­ing bub­bles com­ing out from the dying star. Astronomers are most curi­ous about the equal shape of the bub­ble on either side of the star. This sym­me­try offers sci­en­tists a chance to come up with many dif­fer­ent ideas on the cause.

These images of plan­e­tary neb­ula show astronomers that the Sun’s fate will be much more inter­est­ing, col­or­ful and com­plex than they thought just a few years ago.

The Hub­ble Space Tele­scope took this image in 1997 and 1998. The Ant Neb­ula is located in a small con­stel­la­tion called Norma, the South­ern Tri­an­gle, near the con­stel­la­tion Scor­pius, the scor­pion. Light trav­eled 3,000 years from the “Ant Neb­ula” to reach our eyes on Earth.

Do you see any other pat­terns in this image? Does this ant have legs? What might have caused them?