The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a striking new photo of a planetary nebula called the Necklace Nebula.
This Hubble image shows the Necklace Nebula, a planetary nebula some 15,000 light-years away in the constellation of Sagitta. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / K. Noll.
The Necklace Nebula is located approximately 15,000 light-years away in the northern constellation of Sagitta.
Otherwise known as PN G054.2-03.4 and IRAS 19417+1701, the nebula was discovered in 2005 by astronomers using the Isaac Newton Telescope in the Canary Islands, Spain.
“The Necklace Nebula was produced by a pair of tightly orbiting Sun-like stars,” Hubble astronomers explained.
“Roughly 10,000 years ago, one of the aging stars expanded and engulfed its smaller companion, creating something we call a ‘common envelope’.”
“The smaller star continued to orbit inside its larger companion, increasing the bloated giant’s rotation rate until large parts of it spun outwards into space.”
“This escaping ring of debris formed the Necklace Nebula, with particularly dense clumps of gas forming the bright ‘diamonds’ around the ring.”
“The two stars which created the Necklace Nebula remain so close together — separated by only a few million km — that they appear as a single bright dot in the center of the new Hubble image,” the researchers added.
“Despite their close encounter the stars are still furiously whirling around each other, completing an orbit in just over a day.”
The new image of the Necklace Nebula was made from separate exposures taken in the visible and near-infrared regions of the spectrum with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instrument.
Six filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter.
