The Hubble space telescope has taken the most detailed photograph yet of a fading star that's beaming twin searchlights through its dusty grave.
The Egg Nebula, as astronomers call the object they discovered 37 years ago, is a cocoon of dust and gas illuminated like a lantern by an aging central star.
Slightly larger and hotter than the sun, the star long ago ran out of hydrogen fuel and switched to fusing heavier elements. The change swelled it into a red giant star that ultimately shed most of its outer gases, which are now being blown away by solar winds from the star's small, remaining core.
The thick shroud of gas and dust make the Egg Nebula faint and extraordinarily difficult for astronomers to see, even though it's relatively close at roughly 3,000 light-years away from Earth. So NASA and the European Space Agency aimed their space-based Hubble telescope at the object and stared it down.
The new image is an extreme close-up compared to a photo of the Egg Nebula that Hubble took in 2003 (below). That was six years years before spacewalking astronauts installed the Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, considered by many to be the telescope's most technologically advanced instrument.
In the most recent image, a pair of searchlight beams blast from each end of the dusty torus around the central star. Astronomers aren't certain why the beams take this their peculiar shape, but it may be because the star is actually a double-star system, according to a NASA press release.
Whatever the case, the thick clouds will last for just another 1,000 years or so. In about 10,000 years, the gases of the planetary nebula will be dispersed. After that, the leftover stellar core -- a white dwarf -- may smolder for trillions of years.
*Images: 1) ESA/Hubble/NASA [high resolution] 2) NASA/Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) [high resolution]
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