Bizarre Case of a Red Rectangle

Credit: ESA/Hub­ble and NASA

In early images, a bizarre red rec­tan­gle sur­rounds the star HD 44179. But a closer look by NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope reveals a com­plex X-shaped neb­ula of glow­ing gas around the dis­tant star.

Explore the X-shaped wings of the Red Rec­tan­gle. Within the wings of the neb­ula, sci­en­tists are curi­ous about the for­ma­tion of regularly-spaced lines of glow­ing gas, like the rungs on a lad­der. What other shapes do you see in this image?

HD 44179 was once a star sim­i­lar to our own Sun. It has reached the end of its long lifes­pan and has become a proto-planetary neb­ula. When a star like our Sun burns all of the hydro­gen that fuels nuclear fusion in its core, the star begins to shed its outer lay­ers and puff­s them out into space as giant bub­bles. Astronomers call these cos­mic beau­ties plan­e­tary neb­ula. Radi­a­tion from the dead stars white-hot core, called a white dwarf, heats the expand­ing shell of mate­r­ial caus­ing it to glow. The glow is short-lived, how­ever, last­ing for only about 10,000 years. Our Sun will not enter this stage of trans­for­ma­tion for another four bil­lion years or so.

Astronomers believe that HD 44179 is part of a dou­ble star sys­tem. Per­haps, the orbit of this star affects how the dense dust around the par­ent star is shaped. But sci­en­tists are still puz­zled as to the growth of such spec­tac­u­lar neb­u­lous wings.

The Red Rec­tan­gle is found about 2,300 light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Mono­c­eros, the Uni­corn.