Posts Tagged ‘white dwarf’
Planetary Eye
Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
A hot, core star and colorful nebula is all that’s left of this dying star. NGC 6369, also called the Little Ghost Nebula, is a planetary nebula about 5,000 light-years from Earth toward the constellation Ophiuchus, the snake holder.
Garden Spider
Credit: NASA, ESA, and K. Noll (STScI)
In the starry gardens of the constellation of Puppis, you’ll find this butterfly or spider-looking nebula. NGC 2440 is a planetary nebula and is the remains of a star like our Sun. The central star cast off its outer layers as it came to the point where it could no longer keep up nuclear fusion in its core. Nuclear fusion is what powers a star, giving out light, heat and other radiation. Ultraviolet light from the burned-out star, called a white dwarf, causes the gas around the star to glow. Find the white dot in the center of the nebula.
Spirograph Eye
Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Glowing with many colors, the planetary nebula called the Spirograph Nebula, shows the last stage of a star’s life. After running out of hydrogen fuel, the star at the center grew to a huge red giant. Then the star shed its outer layers, creating a bubble in space. Eventually the small hot core left behind will become a white dwarf.
Red Spiders
Credit: Garrelt Mellema (Leiden University) et al., HST, ESA, NASA
What a tangled web. The Red Spider Nebula, caught in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image, is a two-lobed planetary nebula. Also called butterfly nebulas, these planetary nebula are what remains when a normal, Sun-like star reaches the end of its life. What is left becomes a white dwarf. The Red Spider Nebula, also called NGC 6537, houses one of the hottest white dwarfs astronomers have seen. The nebula is created when gas and dust blown out from the star, called a solar wind, collide with the walls of the nebula. The walls of the nebula aren’t moving as fast. When the two collide, the atoms in the cloud begin to glow. As for the strange shape, stars at the final stage of their life throw off gas and star material in waves and in all different directions.
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By The Riviera Times
By CritterKeeper
By Sarah Q. Brett