Red Rectangle

Credit: NASA/ESA, Hans Van Winckel (Catholic Uni­ver­sity of Leu­ven, Bel­gium) and Mar­tin Cohen (Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, USA)

Amaz­ing ladder-like detail sur­rounds a dying star in this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope. Called the Red Rec­tan­gle because of its shape and color from Earth, this neb­ula has fea­tures like a spider’s web. Astronomers have not seen these fea­tures in any other nebula.

The cen­tral star in the image began much like our own Sun. While the Sun has another 4 bil­lion years before dying, this star has entered the last stages of its life. It began a process of throw­ing off its outer lay­ers about 14,000 years ago. In a few thou­sand years, the star will become hot­ter and will flood the sur­round­ing neb­ula with more radi­a­tion. When this occurs it will begin to glow and cre­ate a plan­e­tary neb­ula.

Some­thing else inter­est­ing in this image of the Red Rec­tan­gle, also called HD 44179, is the dark band in front of the cen­tral star. This is the shadow of a dense disc of dust. Astronomers study­ing the image found that the cen­tral star is actu­ally a pair of stars orbit­ing each other every 10 1/2 months. The orbit of these stars fun­nels gas and dust into the amaz­ing shapes we see.

The Red Rec­tan­gle lies about 2,300 light years from Earth toward the faint con­stel­la­tion of Mono­c­eros the unicorn.