Phantom Eye

Credit: NASA, ESA

An elderly star blows off lay­ers of gas to form this phan­tom eye.

Explore the com­plex lay­ers of the neb­ula in this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope. NGC 6741, also known as the Phan­tom Streak Neb­ula, is a plan­e­tary neb­ula about 7,000 light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Aquila, the Eagle. NGC 6741 was once a star sim­i­lar to our own Sun. When a star with a size sim­i­lar to our Sun burns through all of its hydro­gen fuel, the star begins to shed its outer lay­ers and puffs them out into space as giant bub­bles. Radi­a­tion from the now dead star’s white, hot core, called a white dwarf, heats the expand­ing shells of gas caus­ing the mate­r­ial to glow. Even­tu­ally, the neb­ula will fade as the mate­r­ial cools and expands into space. Other stars in orbit around that sun, or the star’s spin affects the way the bub­ble is formed. Some plan­e­tary form smooth bub­bles while oth­ers have mir­ror­ing lobes of gas embed­ded in many lay­ers of bubbles.

While astronomers call them plan­e­tary neb­u­lae, they have noth­ing to do with plan­ets. Planet hunters in the 17th and 18th cen­turies cat­a­logued many objects that had an orb-like appear­ance in tele­scopes; much like a planet. Edward Charles Pick­er­ing dis­cov­ered this small, faint neb­ula in 1882.