This a spiral planetary nebula, and it’s pretty.
The binary star at its center is a white dwarf in a 4 day orbit around the rare low-mass Wolf-Rayet type central star.
Image Credit: NASA
NGC 5189
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Tag Archives: Planetary Nebula
A Brain in Space?
The brain-like blob called PMR 1 has been nicknamed the “Exposed Cranium.” This planetary nebula, located roughly 5,000 light-years away in the Vela constellation, is host to a hot, massive dying star that is rapidly losing its mass. The nebula’s interior, mushy and red in this view, is made up primarily of ionized gas, while its cooler outer consists of glowing hydrogen molecules.
In this infrared image taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope light at wavelengths of 3.6 µm is rendered in blue, 4.5 µm in green, and 8.0 µm in red.
Image Credit: NASA
The Helix Nebula in IR
ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) captured this infrared view of the Helix Nebula (aka NGC 7293). The planetary nebula is labout 700 light-years away. This false color picture was created from images taken through three different infrared filters. The telescope’s infrared vision reveals cold nebular gas that is mostly obscured in visible images of the Helix.
Image Credit: ESO / VISTA / J. Emerson.
Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit
NGC 7027
NGC 7027 is one of the brightest nebulae in the sky, but it has never been given a common name. In a 6-in telescope at around 50x it appears as a relatively bright bluish star. This Hubble image above shows a bit more detail.
Before being studied via Hubble, NGC 7027 was thought to be a proto-planetary nebula with the central star too cool to ionize any of the gas. It is now known to be a planetary nebula in the earliest stage of its development with a central star is believed to have been about 3 to 4 times the mass of the Sun.
Image Credit: NASA
M46, NGC 2438, and the Rotten Egg Nebula
Video Credit: Deep Sky Video
The Lion Mane Nebula
Video Credit: Dr. Becky
M76
Video Credit: Deep Sky Videos
AD 5,000,000,000 (More of Less)
The Little Ghost Nebula offers a glimpse of the fate of our Sun, which could produce its own planetary nebula about 5 billion years from now. Round and planet-shaped, the nebula (AKA, NGC 6369) is also relatively faint—thus the nickname Little Ghost Nebula. Planetary nebulae really have nothing to do with planets. They are created at the end of a sun-like star’s life as its outer layers expand into space while the star’s core shrinks to become a white dwarf. The transformed white dwarf star in the middle of the nebula radiates strongly at ultraviolet wavelengths and powers the expanding nebula’s glow. This nebula’s main ring structure is about a light-year across and the glow from ionized oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen atoms are colored blue, green, and red respectively.
BTW. about a billion years earlier, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will have merged, probably causing significant changes in the galactic neighborhood.
Image Credit: NASA/Hubble Heritage Team
A White Dwarf and Its Nebula
This is the planetary nebula NGC 3918, a brilliant cloud of colorful gas in the constellation of Centaurus, roughly 4,900 light-years from Earth. In the center of the cloud of gas lies a tiny star, the dying remnant of a red giant. When such a star dies, huge clouds of gas are ejected from its surface before collapses to become a white dwarf. Intense ultraviolet radiation from the tiny remnant star causes the surrounding gas cloud to glow.
NGC 3918 has a distinctive eye-like shape with a bright inner shell of gas and a more diffuse outer shell that extends far from the nebula and looks as if it could be the result of two separate irruptions of gas. However, studies of the object suggest that the two cloud components were formed at the same time but are being blown from the star at different speeds. The powerful jets of gas emerging from the ends of the large structure are estimated to be shooting away from the star at speeds of up to 350,000 km/h/
Image Credit: ESA / NASA
An Eye in Space?
Even though it looks like it belongs atop the Dark Tower of Barad-dûr, this fiery swirl is actually a planetary nebula known as ESO 456-67. It lies in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer) in the southern sky.
It is possible to see in this image of the nebula the various layers of material expelled by the central star. Each appears in a different color—red, orange, yellow, and green-tinted bands of gas are visible, with clear patches of at the center. Astronomers don’t fully understood how planetary nebulae form such a wide variety of shapes and structures. Some are spherical, some elliptical, others shoot material in waves from their polar regions, some look like hourglasses or figures of eight, and others resemble large, messy stellar explosions.
Image Credit: NASA
A Dying Star
This Hubble image is of the planetary nebula He 2-47, the remnant of a dying star. These gaseous clouds are created when stars in the last stages of life cast off their outer layers of material into space. Hen 2-47’s six lobes of gas and dust that suggest that the central star of the nebula ejected material at least three times in different directions. During each ejection, the paired jets of gas pointed in opposite directions, eventually giving the nebula it’s present shape.
Image Credit: NASA
A Fading Nebula
Data from the Hubble Space Telescope reveal that the nebula Hen 3-1357 (aka the Stingray Nebula) has faded dramatically over the past two decades. These two strikingly different images of the nebula were captured 20 years apart. The image on the left was taken in March, 1996, and shows the nebula’s central star in the final stages of its life. The gas being puffed off by the dying star is much brighter than the gas photographed in January, 2016. It’s very rare to see a nebula change so quickly.
Image Credits: NASA / ESA / B. Balick (University of Washington), M. Guerrero (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía), and G. Ramos-Larios (Universidad de Guadalajara)
A Possible Future
Stars like our Sun end their lives by casting off their outer layers, briefly forming a spectacular “planetary nebula” like the Helix Nebula. In 5 billion years or so, our Sun will probably go through a similar blowout.
This brief video fades between images taken at different wavelengths which show different aspects of the nebula. Optical: Hot gas ejected from a dying star glows. Near-Infrared: Near-infrared light reveals cooler material. Mid-far-Infrared: Warm dust is identified in mid-infrared light. Infrared-Ultraviolet: The ultraviolet light traces the hot gas being expelled from the dying star.
Video Credit: STScI
A Ring of Fire
This rather unusual planetary nebula is the Fine Ring Nebula. Planetary nebulae form from dying stars when they have expanded into a red giant phase and then eject a shell of gas as they evolve into the next phase of their stellar evolution, white dwarfs. Most planetary nebulae are either spherical or elliptical in shape, or are bipolar (featuring two symmetric lobes of material), but the Fine Ring Nebula looks like an almost perfectly circular ring. Astronomers believe that this unusually shaped planetary nebula was formed from a binary system. The interaction between the primary star and its orbiting companion shapes the ejected material.
The stellar object at the center of the Fine Ring Nebula does appear to be a binary system, orbiting with a period of 2.9 days. Observations suggest that the binary pair is almost perfectly face-on from our vantage point, implying that the planetary nebula’s structure is aligned in the same way. Our point of view looks down on the torus (doughnut shape) of ejected material, leading to the strikingly circular ring shape in the image.
Image Credit: ESO
IC 4593
Video Credit: NASA
A Ghost Ring Sight
NGC 6369 is a planetary nebula also known as the Little Ghost Nebula. Planetary nebulae aren’t related to planets. They’re gaseous shrouds created at the end of a Sun-like star’s life as the dying star’s outer layers expand while its core shrinks to become a white dwarf. The white dwarf radiates strongly at ultraviolet wavelengths, powering the expanding nebula’s glow. NGC 636’s main round structure is about a light-year across, and the glow from its ionized oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen atoms are colored blue, green, and red respectively. The Little Ghost Nebula offers a glimpse of the likely fate of our Sun which could produce its own planetary nebula about 5 billion years from now.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
A Spiral Nebula
The two spiral arms winding toward a bright center might trick you into thinking you are looking at a galaxy a bit like our Milky Way, but this object, PK329-02.2, is a planetary nebula within our galaxy.
Image Credit: ESA
A Star Over Easy
This picture of the nebula around a rare yellow hypergiant star called IRAS 17163-3907 is the best ever taken of such a star, showing for the first time the double shell of dust around the central star. The star and its shells resemble an egg white around a yolk, leading to the nickname of Fried Egg Nebula.
Image Credit: ESO
NGC 2899
Video Credit: ESO
Hubble Versus My Backyard Telescope
NGC 7027 is one of the brightest nebulae in the sky, but it has never been given a common name. In a 6-in telescope at around 50x it appears as a relatively bright bluish star. I didn’t take the picture on the right, but it’s the sort of view I get with my backyard telescope. The Hubble image above shows a bit more detail.
Before being studied via Hubble, NGC 7027 was thought to be a proto-planetary nebula with the central star too cool to ionize any of the gas. It is now known to be a planetary nebula in the earliest stage of its development with a central star is believed to have been about 3 to 4 times the mass of the Sun.
Image Credit: NASA
NGC 2392
Video Credit: NASA
NGC 7027
NGC 7027 is a very young and dense planetary nebula about 3,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus Only a few hundred years old, it’s a tiny infant. Indeed, it’s one of the smallest planetary nebulae, only 0.2 by 0.1 light-year. Most planetary nebulae are around 1 light-year across. NGC 7027 has a very complex structure, consisting of inner elliptical region of ionized gas inside of a large cloud of neutral gas.
The white dwarf at the core of the nebula has a mass about 70 percent of the Sun’s. The expanding halo has roughly three times the mass of the Sun.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
A Shell in a Fish
These thin wisps of gas are an object known as SNR 0519. The blood-red clouds are the remains from a violent explosion of a star as a supernova seen about 600 years ago. The star that exploded is known to have been a white dwarf star—a Sun-like star in the final stages of its life.
SNR 0519 is over 150 000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Dorado (The Dolphinfish), a constellation that also contains most of our neighboring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud, a region of the sky is full of intriguing and beautiful deep sky objects. The Large Magellanic Cloud orbits the Milky Way galaxy as a satellite and is the fourth largest in our group of galaxies.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
A Celestial Diamond Ring
ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile captured this eye-catching image of planetary nebula PN A66 33 (aka Abell 33). This beautiful blue bubble in space was created when an aging star blew off its outer layers, and it is, by chance, aligned with a foreground star. From the Earth’s point of view the pair bears an uncanny resemblance to a diamond engagement ring.
Image Credit: ESO
The Helix Nebula
The Helix Nebula (aka NGC 7293) is a large planetary nebula located in the constellation Aquarius. It’s about 700 light-years away. The Helix Nebula has sometimes been referred to as the “Eye of God.” Tolkien fans have occasionally called it the “Eye of Sauron”
This animation of a 3-D model was created from Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based data of the Helix Nebula.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)