Necklace of Light

Credit: NASA and The Hub­ble Her­itage Team (STScI/AURA)

A daz­zling cos­mic neck­lace glows in this image from the NASA/ESA Hub­ble Space Telescope.

Explore the glow­ing knots of gas and dust in the Neck­lace Neb­ula. What sto­ries or pic­tures do you see in this image? Leave us a note below.

The recently dis­cov­ered Neck­lace Neb­ula is the glow­ing remains of a Sun-like star. The end of a stars life is any­thing but peace­ful. Once the fuel source of hydro­gen and helium run out for a star like our Sun, it swells to enor­mous size and becomes a red giant. Dur­ing this process, the star puffs off bub­bles of gas. Blis­ter­ing radi­a­tion and ultra­vi­o­let light from the white hot core of the star cause the gas to glow like a neon sign. The beau­ti­ful result is called a plan­e­tary neb­ula.

Astronomers believe the Neck­lace Neb­ula, also called PN GO54.2–03.4, is the blasted remains of a giant star that came too close to its Sun-like com­pan­ion. The two stars are locked in a small orbit around each other. They orbit each other in only 1.2 days. As you explore the image, look for the knots in the glow­ing ring. Each knot, made up of glow­ing hydro­gen and oxy­gen gas, has a tail point­ing away from the cen­tral star. Clumps of mate­r­ial in the ring may be den­sity changes in the shared mate­r­ial of the stars prior to the explo­sion that occurred only about 5,000 years ago. The inner ring of mate­r­ial cov­ers an area about half a light year. A light year is the dis­tance light trav­els in one year; about six tril­lion miles. This ring would encir­cle our entire solar sys­tem. To the upper right and lower left of the neb­ula, look for faint red­dish lobes. Astronomers pre­dict these lobes were ejected about 10,000 years ago. Now they span a dis­tance of about nine light-years. Dis­tant and faint galax­ies are seen in the image as well.

The Neck­lace Neb­ula is found about 15,000 light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion of Sagitta, the arrow. Sci­en­tists dis­cov­ered the neb­ula in 2005 dur­ing the Isaac New­ton Tele­scope Pho­to­met­ric H-alpha Sur­vey (IPHAS), a ground-based plan­e­tary neb­ula study of the north­ern galac­tic plane.