Space Pictures This Week: Shuttle Swap, Hubble's Jewels

Space Pictures This Week: Shuttle Swap, Hubble's Jewels


Spacey Jewelry
Image courtesy ESA/NASA

Dense, bright knots of gas shine like jewels in a recently released Hubble Space Telescope picture of the Necklace nebula, a planetary nebula about 15,000 light-years away. Discovered in 2005, the cosmic adornment is actually a cloud of gas and dust created by the death of a sunlike star.

About 10,000 years ago the dying star swelled into a red giant and enveloped a close stellar companion. This caused the dead star's core and the companion star—seen together above as a central dot—to whirl around each other so fast that they now complete an orbit in less than a day.

Due to centrifugal force, most of the gas from the swollen star escaped along the star's equator, producing the unusual ring.

Published August 18, 2011


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Comments (1)


sumitup
3:32 AM on August 19, 2011
"The Necklace Nebula"- BEST nebula-name EVER!
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