Ringing Ornament

Credit: NASA & ESA

Wouldn’t it be great to put glow­ing orna­ments like this on your Christ­mas tree?

This image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope is one of the most detailed looks at M57, or the Ring Neb­ula. This kind of neb­ula is all that remains when a star like our Sun dies. When a star sim­i­lar in size and mass of our Sun reaches the end of it’s lifes­pan, it expands greatly and becomes a red giant. With a diam­e­ter swal­low­ing up the inner plan­ets, the star will stay in this stage for some time. Even­tu­ally, when the star’s fuel source of hydro­gen and helium are all used up, the puffed up state can­not be kept up and the star expels its outer lay­ers into space, pro­duc­ing a glow­ing bub­ble called a plan­e­tary neb­ula.

The “ring” in this image is actu­ally a cylin­der of gas as if we’re look­ing at the end of it. Usu­ally thick clouds of dust form around the mid­dle of a star. This slows down the rate that the neb­ula expands. But above and below the star, at it’s poles, there is less dust so the neb­ula expands quicker in those directions.

Explore the edges of the Ring Neb­ula and find the finger-like clouds point­ing toward the cen­tral star. M57 is about 2,000 light years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Lyra. In our star­ship, trav­el­ing at the speed of light, it would take a lit­tle more than a year to cross the Ring Nebula.