Sentences with phrase «planetary nebula»

Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 captured this image of planetary nebula NGC 2440 on Feb. 6, 2007.

The final stages of life for a star like our Sun result in the star blowing its outer layers out into the surrounding space, forming objects known as planetary nebulae in a wide range of beautiful and striking shapes.

The Hubble telescope has spied a giant celestial «eye,» known as planetary nebula NGC 6751.

NIRES Principal Investigator Keith Matthews of Caltech (left) with W. M. Keck Observatory Director Hilton Lewis (right) after successfully achieving «first light» with a spectral image of planetary nebula NGC 7027.

Finally, they expel their outer layers, producing expanding shells of gas called planetary nebulae (figure 2).

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals The Cat's Eye Nebula to be one of the most complex planetary nebulae known.

The catalogue used a scheme in which the previously used Secchi classes (I to IV) were subdivided into more specific classes, given letters from A to N. Also, the letters O, P, and Q were used — O for stars whose spectra consisted mainly of bright lines, P for planetary nebulae, and Q for stars not fitting into any other class.

The dynamical effects of two stars orbiting one another most easily explains the intricate structures, which are much more complicated than features seen in most planetary nebulae.

H. Bond (STSci), R. Ciardullo (PSU), WFPC2, HST, NASA CM Draconis B is a white dwarf (a remnant stellar core which enriched its binary companions, Stars Aab, with elements heavier than hydrogen when it cast off its outer gas layers) like planetary nebula NGC 2440.

One type of such nebulae, known as bipolar planetary nebulae, create ghostly hourglass or butterfly shapes around their parent stars.

Based on a culmination of ten years of research work, the new method to estimate more accurate distances between planetary nebulae and the Earth developed by HKU astronomers promises a new era in scientists» ability to study and understand the fascinating if brief period in the final stages of the lives of low - and mid-mass stars.

This Hubble telescope image shows one of the most complex planetary nebulae ever seen, NGC 6543, nicknamed the «Cat's Eye Nebula.»

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows one of the most complex planetary nebulae ever seen, NGC 6543, nicknamed the «Cat's Eye Nebula.»

An artist's impression of the heart of planetary nebula Henize 2 - 428, where researchers have identified two white dwarf stars destined to merge and create a Type Ia supernova

Not to be left out, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have photographed a festive - looking nearby planetary nebula called NGC 5189.

Though the Cat's Eye Nebula was one of the first planetary nebulae to be discovered, it is one of the most complex such nebulae seen in space.

This star is located about 27.4 light - years (ly) away from our Sun, Sol, at the western part of (11:43:14.9 - 51:49:57, ICRS 2000.0) of Constellation Centaurus, the Centaur — west of Delta and Rho Centauri and northwest of the Blue Planetary Nebula (NGC 3918) and Gacrux.

IT LOOKS like a soap bubble or perhaps even a camera fault, but the image at right is a newly discovered planetary nebula.

And neither the individual nebulae, nor the stars that formed them, would have interacted with other planetary nebulae.

«We want to identify the process that causes these amazing transformations from a puffed - up red giant to a beautiful, glowing planetary nebula,» Sahai said.

To O'Dell, who has been observing planetary nebulas for more than 40 years, all those beautiful shapes are a confounding diversion.

This is how planetary nebulae come to be:

Many planetary nebulae have extremely complex and varied morphologies.

Chemical calculations show that helium hydride should be visible in clouds around distant galaxies and supernovas, or even in modern planetary nebulas (shells of gas expelled by aged, sunlike stars).

The resulting so - called «surface brightness — radius relation» has been robustly calibrated using more than 300 planetary nebulae whose accurate distances have been determined via independent and reliable means (e.g. trigonometric parallax measurements of their central stars).

Ghostly and beautiful planetary nebulae» have nothing to do with planets but acquired this name because these glowing spheres of ionized gas resembled planets to early observers.

This is combined with the use of the authors» own robust techniques to effectively remove «doppelgangers» and mimics that have seriously contaminated previous planetary nebulae catalogues, which added considerable scatter to previous statistical distance scales.

«In the past, the old distance scales worked fairly well for small planetary nebulae but got systematically worse for the larger nebulae.

Over the next thousand years the nebula is expected to evolve into a fully - fledged planetary nebula.

Related sites Abstract of Dekel et al. paper, with link to full text Planetary Nebula Spectrograph, used in Romanowsky's studies An introduction to dark matter

Stars like our sun will grow into behemoths called red giants before they shed their outer layers and become an ethereal planetary nebula.

For this shot of the Ant Nebula, Schmidt started with typical Hubble data sets and combined them to achieve these colors, while also adjusting the color balance and sharpening the details to create an original view of the symmetrical planetary nebula, the remains of a star that blew itself to pieces.

[5] Since the discovery of Pease 1, only three other globular clusters have been found to host planetary nebulae: Messier 22, NGC 6441, and Palomar 6.

This number is so low because planetary nebulae are a very brief, short - lived phase at the end of the lives of low to moderate mass stars — which are not common within globular clusters.

But how do spherical stars evolve to produce highly aspherical planetary nebulae?

«Pre-planetary» and «planetary» nebulae are different in the nature of the light they produce; pre-planetary nebulae reflect light, whereas mature planetary nebulae shine through ionisation (where atoms lose or gain electrons).

The name planetary nebulae originally came from astronomer William Herschel, who first observed them in the 1780s, and thought they were newly forming gaseous planets.

[1] The «long axis» of a bipolar planetary nebula slices through the wings of the butterfly, whilst the «short axis» slices through the body.

The term planetary nebula is something of a misnomer, which arises from the fact that they are often round and resemble planets in low - resolution observations.

But in fact planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets — they are luminous clouds thrown off by dying stars.

The more matter spewed out along the equator rather than the poles, the more peanut - shaped, or «bipolar,» the final planetary nebula.

Only collisions between spherical winds create spherical shocks and therefore round planetary nebulas.

Modern astronomers recognize planetary nebulas as the fossil wreckage of dying stars ripped apart by powerful winds.

Last year astronomers using Cray supercomputers in the United States and the Netherlands performed hundreds of planetary nebula simulations, which revealed a rich array of behavior in the shock wave layer cake.

They christened these objects planetary nebulas, or planetary clouds.

After a few hours or weeks, depending on how super the supercomputer is, a thousand years of planetary nebula history is waiting in the computer's memory to be studied in detail.

Abell 39 is an ancient planetary nebula that has been spreading out for thousands of years.

The central star in the Blinking Planetary Nebula (middle) is shedding mysteriously bright clumps of gas, which glow red.

The Little Ghost (right) is a more classic planetary nebula: Its doughnut is the steadily expanding ring of star gas that has been ionized and set aglow by ultraviolet light from the central white dwarf.