NEW YORK: MyCn 18 is a young planetary nebula located in the southern constellation Musca, about 8000 light-years from Earth.
The term ‘planetary nebula’ is actually a misnomer coined by astronomer William Herschel in the 1780s, when he first saw one of these objects through a telescope and thought they resembled the rounded shape of a planet.
The star that created MyCn 18 started life as a low mass star like our Sun.
Over billions of years it expanded to become a red giant. Once its nuclear fuel was expended, its gaseous outer envelope puffed off into space, exposing its white hot core at the centre of the image.
This core is destined to slowly cool down over the eons as a white dwarf star.
The unprecedented sharpness of this Hubble Space Telescope image has revealed surprising details of the nebula ejection process, helping scientists to resolve some of the outstanding mysteries of the complex shapes and symmetries of planetary nebulas.
Astronomers think the hourglass shape is produced by the expansion of a fast stellar wind within a slowly expanding cloud that is denser near its equator than its poles.
The nebula’s glowing delicate rings outline the tenuous walls of the hourglass.
Nitrogen lights up in red, hydrogen in green and oxygen in blue.
It is predicted that our Sun will meet the same fate in around six billion years. When our Sun becomes a red giant, its outer envelope expands to engulf Mercury, Venus, and almost certainly, the Earth as well.
This artificially colourised image was taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
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