WASHINGTON: NASA’s Hubble telescope has stumbled upon a little colourful gem nebula – an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other ionised gases. This colourful bubble is a planetary nebula called NGC 6818, also known as the “Little Gem Nebula”.
It is located in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer), roughly 6,000 light-years away from us.
The rich glow of the cloud is just over half a light-year across – humongous compared to its tiny central star – but still a little gem on a cosmic scale.
When stars like the sun enter “retirement”, they shed their outer layers into space to create glowing clouds of gas called planetary nebulae.
This ejection of mass is uneven, and planetary nebulae can have very complex shapes.
“NGC 6818 shows knotty filament-like structures and distinct layers of material, with a bright and enclosed central bubble surrounded by a larger, more diffuse cloud,” the US space agency said in a statement.
Scientists believe that the stellar wind from the central star propels the outflowing material, sculpting the elongated shape of NGC 6818.
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