Starry Dragonfly

Credit: ESA/Hub­ble & NASA

A starry drag­on­fly flits deep in space in this image the NASA/ESA Hub­ble Space Telescope.

Explore the odd shape of a pro­to­plan­e­tary neb­ula called the West­brook Neb­ula. What sto­ries and shapes do you see in this image? Share a note below.

Plan­e­tary neb­u­lae come in many curi­ous shapes. They are usu­ally round in shape. Some­times lobes of gas shoot out cre­at­ing a beau­ti­ful but­ter­fly, or drag­on­fly, shape.

Plan­e­tary neb­u­lae have noth­ing to do with plan­ets really. Planet hunters in the 18th and 19th cen­turies dis­cov­ered many objects that through their tele­scopes looked like the plan­ets Uranus and Nep­tune. It wasn’t until the late 19th and 20th cen­turies did astronomers deter­mine that they were bub­bles of gas and dust blown out from dying stars. After burn­ing for upward of 10 bil­lion years, stars the size of our Sun even­tu­ally burn through their vast reserves of nuclear fuel in the form of hydro­gen gas. At this point they puff up into red giants. The outer lay­ers of the star are puffed out into space cre­at­ing shells of gas and dust. Hid­den deep within the dusty shroud, the super hot, but dead, core of the star lights up the gas around it. The star has trans­formed into a plan­e­tary nebula.

West­brook Neb­ula, named after William E. West­brook, also called PK166-06, CRL 618 and AFGL 618, hasn’t quite reached that point. The neb­ula started form­ing only a cou­ple hun­dred years ago so astronomers using Hub­ble have cap­tured the object in a brief pro­to­plan­e­tary phase. Only a few hun­dred are known in the Milky Way Galaxy. They are cool and hard to see. But the story they tell helps sci­en­tists unravel the mys­ter­ies of star for­ma­tion and star death.