2024-04-23 23:52:26
17:38
He The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope turns 34 on April 24, and celebrates by capturing the photogenic Little Dumbbell Nebula, located 3,400 light-years away in the constellation Perseus.
Since its launch in 1990, the telescope has made 1.6 million observations of more than 53,000 astronomical objects. To date, the Space Telescope Science Institute’s Mikulski space telescope archive contains 184 terabytes of processed data ready for astronomers worldwide to use for research and analysis. Since 1990, 44,000 scientific papers have been published based on Hubble observations.
Most of the discoveries were not foreseen before the launch, such as supermassive black holes, exoplanet atmospheres, gravitational lensing of dark matter, the presence of dark energy and the abundance of planet formation among stars.
Now, Hubble captures a nebula known as Messier 76, M76 or NGC 650/651, which is classified as a planetary nebula, an expanding shell of bright gases that was ejected from a dying red giant star. The star eventually collapses and becomes a hot, ultradense white dwarf.
A planetary nebula is not related to planetsbut it has that name because 18th-century astronomers, using low-power telescopes, believed that this type of object resembled a planet.
M76 consists of a ring, seen on edge as the central rod structure, and two lobes in each opening of the ring. Before the star burned up, it expelled the ring of gas and dust.
The ring was likely sculpted by the impact of the star that once had a binary companion star. This dislodged material created a thick disk of dust and gas along the plane of the companion’s orbit. The hypothetical companion star is not seen in the Hubble image, so it might have been swallowed later by the central star. The disc would be forensic evidence of that stellar cannibalism.
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The primary star collapses to form a white dwarf. It is one of the hottest stellar remnants known, with a scorching temperature of 138,000 degrees Celsius, 24 times the surface temperature of our Sun. The sizzling white dwarf can be seen as a dot in the center of the nebula. A star visible in projection below it is not part of the nebula.
Trapped by the disc, two lobes of hot gas escape from the top and bottom of the “belt”, along the star’s axis of rotation which is perpendicular to the disc. They are propelled by the hurricane-like flow of material from the dying star, hurtling through space at three million kilometers per hour. That’s fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in just over seven minutes.
This violent “stellar wind” collides with cooler, slower gas ejected earlier in the star’s life, when it was a red giant. The superhot star’s violent ultraviolet radiation causes the gases to glow. The red color comes from nitrogen and the blue from oxygen.
Since our solar system is 4.6 billion years old, the entire nebula is a glimpse of cosmological timekeeping. It will disappear in regarding 15,000 years.
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