#egg nebula

[spacewonder19]

Shimmering Light in Egg Nebula © Hubble

[cosmonautroger]

Egg Nebula

[spacetelescopescience]

As a dying, Sun-like star puts on a stunning display of light, shadow, and dust, the Hubble Space Telescope is watching it unfold. Hubble’s sharp vision reveals the clearest view yet of the Egg Nebula, revealing intricate details of the enigmatic Egg’s remarkable structure.

These newest observations, taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, provide clues to the complex processes shaping the Egg Nebula. They offer scientists a rare opportunity to test theories of late-stage stellar evolution.

The spectacular Egg Nebula is the youngest and closest nebula of its type ever discovered. The remarkably symmetrical structure is created by the nebula’s central star casting off outer layers.

Powerful beams of starlight blast out of the central cloud and illuminate the cosmic structure. Fast-moving outflows of hot, molecular hydrogen also emerge from within the dust cloud, visible at the base of the searchlight beams. The central dust cloud is surrounded by faint, nested arcs of gas.

The starlight beams are reflected by these layers of gas, creating the appearance of ripples. The reflected starlight reveals important details about the central star, which is impossible to view directly in its dusty shell.

Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, B. Balick (University of Washington).

[blasteffect]

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐠𝐠 𝐍𝐞𝐛𝐮𝐥𝐚 (𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐮𝐛𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐓𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐞)

Ever wonder what it would look like to crack open the Sun? The Egg Nebula, a dying Sun-like star, can unscramble this question. Pictured is a combination of several visible and infrared images of the nebula (also known as RAFGL 2688 or CRL 2688) taken with the Hubble Space Telescope.

The star has shed its outer layers, and a bright, hot core (or "yolk") now illuminates the milky "egg white" shells of gas and dust surrounding the center. The central lobes and rings are structures of gas and dust recently ejected into space, with the dust being dense enough to block our view of the stellar core.

Light beams emanate from that blocked core, escaping through holes carved in the older ejected material by newer, faster jets expelled from the star’s poles.

Astronomers are still trying to figure out what causes the disks, lobes, and jets during this short (only a few thousand years!) phase of the star’s evolution, making this an 'egg-cellent' image to study!

Image Credit & Copyright: ESA/Hubble & NASA, B. Balick (U. Washington)

[refuge-in-oblivion]

i don't know why i do this to myself

© ESA/Hubble & NASA, B.Balick (U. Washington)

© Kamil Fiedosiuk

© Designpics/Adobe Stock

[luciacristina15s]

Beautiful Egg Nebula!

NGC 1360: The Robin’s Egg Nebula

This pretty nebula lies some 1,500 light-years away, its shape and color in this telescopic view reminiscent of a robin's egg. The cosmic cloud spans about 3 light-years, nestled securely within the boundaries of the southern constellation of the Furnace (Fornax). Recognized as a planetary nebula, egg-shaped NGC 1360 doesn't represent a beginning, though.

Instead, it corresponds to a brief and final phase in the evolution of an aging star. In fact, visible at the center of the nebula, the central star of NGC 1360 is known to be a binary star system likely consisting of two evolved white dwarf stars, less massive but much hotter than the Sun.

Their intense and otherwise invisible ultraviolet radiation has stripped away electrons from the atoms in their mutually surrounding gaseous shroud. The blue-green hue inside of NGC 1360 seen here is the strong emission produced as electrons recombine with doubly ionized oxygen atoms.

Image Credit & Copyright: Andrea Iorio, Vikas Chander & ShaRA Team

[livingforstars]

Shells in the Egg Nebula - May 20th, 1997.

"The Egg Nebula is taking a beating. Like a baby chick pecking its way out of an egg, the star in the center of the Egg Nebula is casting away shells of gas and dust as it slowly transforms itself into a white dwarf star. The above picture was taken by the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) onboard the Hubble Space Telescope. A thick torus of dust now surrounds the star through which the shell gas is escaping. Newly expelled gas shells escape in beams, as can be seen in the original HST image and in the released image shown above. This infrared image is coded in false-colour to highlight two different types of emission. The red light represents hot hydrogen gas heated by the collisions of expanding shells. The blue light represents light from the central star scattered by the dust in the nebula. It takes light about 3000 years to reach us from the Egg Nebula, which is hundreds of times the size of our Solar System."

[krakenmare]

Hubble: Egg Nebula, also known as CRL-2688 (January 16, 1996)