Hubble Provides Most Detailed Image Of Ring Nebula To Date
[WATCH VIDEOS: Flying Around The Ring Nebula | Secrets Of The Ring Nebula] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The Hubble Space Telescope has provided one of the most detailed images of the Ring Nebula so far, allowing...
Latest Planetary nebula Stories
WASHINGTON, May 23, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Ring Nebula's distinctive shape makes it a popular illustration for astronomy books. But new observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of the glowing gas shroud around an old, dying, sun-like star reveal a new twist. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "The nebula is not like a bagel, but rather, it's like a jelly doughnut, because it's filled with material in the middle," said C. Robert O'Dell of...
[ Watch the Video: Zooming In On The Planetary Nebula IC 1295 ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new image released by the European Space Observatory (ESO) shows the glowing green planetary nebula IC 1295. The new pictures taken by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) shows the nebula surrounding a dim and dying star located about 3300 light-years away in the constellation of Scutum (The Shield). "It has the unusual feature of being surrounded by multiple shells...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An international team of astronomers are reporting in The Astrophysical Journal they have spotted what resembles a soccer ball sitting in the dying star M1-11. Five instruments helped astronomers detect C60 fluorine in the dying star, which are molecules of carbon with 60 atoms arranged in patterns that resemble a soccer ball. Astronomers used the Subaru Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope (SST), ESO's Very Large Telescope, the...
The Royal Astronomical Society Continuing a tradition stretching back more than 25 centuries, astronomers have used the new 2.3-m 'Aristarchos' telescope, sited at Helmos Observatory (2340m high) in the Pelοponnese Mountains in Greece, to determine the distance to and history of an enigmatic stellar system, discovering it to likely be a binary star cocooned within an exotic nebula. The researchers, Panos Boumis of the National Observatory of Athens and John Meaburn of the University of...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have released a new Hubble Space Telescope image of the planetary nebula NGC 5189. In the essence of the Christmas spirit, ESA describes the cosmic structure of the eruption as a "giant and brightly colored ribbon in space." The structure visible within NGC 5189 is particularly dramatic, and the space agencies said the image is the most detailed yet image of this object. Planetary...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers recently found evidence for a dying star coming back to life, giving insight into what may be the fate of our own Solar System in a few billion years. The picture released by the European Space Agency (ESA) is of the planetary nebula Abell 30, located 5,500 light-years away from Earth. A planetary nebula is the often-concentric shells of stellar material cast into space by dying stars. Astronomers in the 18th century...
[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] | Video 3 ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have discovered a pair of stars orbiting each other at the center of a remarkable example of a planetary nebula. The latest find confirms a theory about what controls the spectacular and symmetric appearance of the material flung out into space. Planetary nebulae are glowing shells of gas around white dwarfs, and Fleming 1 is considered a great example that has strikingly...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An international team of astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has created a sweeping new survey of dying stars – or planetary nebula – in the neighborhood of the Sun. The resulting X-ray images shed light on the violent "end game" of a Sun-like star's life. Led by Joel Kastner from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), the team won seven days of observation time with Chandra in 2011-2012 to survey and image...
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has been at the cutting edge of research into what happens to stars like our sun at the ends of their lives. One stage that stars pass through as they run out of nuclear fuel is called the preplanetary or protoplanetary nebula stage. This Hubble image of the Egg Nebula shows one of the best views to date of this brief but dramatic phase in a star’s life. The preplanetary nebula phase is a short period in the cycle of stellar evolution, and has nothing...
[ Watch the Video ] ESO’s VISTA telescope, at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, has captured a striking new image of the Helix Nebula. This picture, taken in infrared light, reveals strands of cold nebular gas that are invisible in images taken in visible light, as well as bringing to light a rich background of stars and galaxies. The Helix Nebula is one of the closest and most remarkable examples of a planetary nebula [1]. It lies in the constellation of Aquarius (The Water Bearer),...
Latest Planetary nebula Reference Libraries
Star -- A star is a self-gravitating sphere of plasma in hydrostatic equilibrium that generates energy in its interior through the process of nuclear fusion. Energy from this process radiates into space as electromagnetic radiation and neutrinos. Star formation and evolution As learned by star formation astronomers, stars are born in molecular clouds, regions of higher density of matter, and form by gravitational instability inside those clouds. High mass stars illuminate powerfully...
Planetary Nebula -- A planetary nebula is an astronomical object that usually appears nebulous and disk-like in low-resolution observations. Because of this appearance, similar to the appearance of planets in early observations, the "planetary" adjective was attached and has since been retained for historical consistency. According to current observations and models, planetary nebulae in fact have little to do with planets. Instead, as a small star (less than a few times the mass...
Nebula -- in astronomy, observed manifestation of a collection of highly rarefied gas and dust in interstellar space. Prior to the 1960s this term was also applied to bodies later discovered to be galaxies, e.g., the so-called Great Nebula in the constellation Andromeda. In 1864, William Huggins confirmed William Herschel's conclusion that nebulae are not swarms of stars by determining that the spectra of nebulae are made of bright lines characteristic of radiating gases. Diffuse...
Saturn Nebula -- The layers of the Saturn Nebula give a complex picture of how this planetary nebula was created. The above picture, taken in April 1996 and released last week, allows a better understanding of the mysterious process that transformed a low-mass star into a white dwarf star. A computer model indicates that the central star of NGC 7009 first expelled the green gas that now appears barrel shaped. This green gas now confines stellar winds flowing from the central star,...
Ring Nebula -- Discovered by Antoine Darquier de Pellepoix in 1779. The famous ring nebula M57 is often regarded as the prototype of a planetary nebula, and a showpiece in the northern hemisphere summer sky. Recent research has confirmed that it is, most probably, actually a ring (torus) of bright light-emitting material surrounding its central star, and not a spherical (or ellipsoidal) shell, thus coinciding with an early assumption by John Herschel. Viewed from this equatorial...
