Starfish

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

Six lobes of gas and dust out­line the legs of a starfish in this image of plan­e­tary neb­ula He 2–47. The neb­ula puffed off mate­r­ial at least three times at the end of its life, fir­ing off jets of gas in oppo­site directions.

Plan­e­tary neb­ula are the last stages of Sun-like star’s life when they cast off their outer lay­ers into space, cre­at­ing a bub­ble around the cen­tral star. A hot, white dwarf is left behind. The white dwarf floods the newly cre­ated bub­ble of gas and dust with ultra­vi­o­let light caus­ing the gas to glow, leav­ing the neb­ula with its dra­matic colors.

Explore the lobes and inte­rior bub­ble of He 2–47, seen in this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope. He 2–47 is a young neb­ula dom­i­nated by cool red-colored nitro­gen gas. This starfish-shaped neb­ula is located about 7,000 light-years from Earth toward the south­ern con­stel­la­tion Carina. This neb­ula will con­tinue to expand into space but the glow will last only about 10,000 years; a tiny part of a star’s 10 bil­lion year life-span.

While the round shapes of plan­e­tary neb­ula resem­bled plan­ets as seen through small tele­scopes of the eigh­teenth and nine­teenth cen­turies, they really have noth­ing to do with plan­ets. Astronomers in the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury real­ized that plan­e­tary neb­ula lay far out­side the solar sys­tem as they dis­cov­ered that the uni­verse was much larger than pre­vi­ously thought.