The Iconic Ring Nebula in a Different Light
Earlier this summer the folks at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute released a gorgeous multi-wavelength view of the Ring Nebula. It’s a summertime sight for those of us in the northern hemisphere and a wintertime sky object for those in the southern hemisphere who live far enough north to see it. You need a telescope to spot it, and to really see the great details of this expanding cloud of gas and dust, you need the combined power of the Hubble Space Telescope along with several ground-based telescopes, and infrared data from the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona.
What they show us is not just the iconic Ring Nebula we’ve all come to know and love, but they also give us an infrared peek at the space around the nebula. This is a planetary nebula —the last gasp of a sun-like star as it dies. Hidden from optical view but clearly apparent in infrared light are scallop-shaped bands of material that were actually blown away from the central star earlier in its evolutionary path toward forming the nebula.
The blue-colored gas in the central area of the is actually a football-shaped structure that pierce into a surrounding cloud of reddish-colored doughnut-shaped material. If you click on the image at left you’ll get a much larger version that you can explore and spy out dark, irregular knots of dense gas embedded along the inner rim of the ring. The knots look like spokes in a bicycle.
Someday our Sun could look something like this as it takes the pathway toward planetary nebula-hood and eventual old age as a white dwarf. Once it uses up all the hydrogen in its core (in about 5 billion years), the Sun will star to expand and become a bloated red giant. Then, it will expel all its outer layers, leaving behind a very hot, very small and dense white dwarf. It will take billions of years to cool down and become a darkened cinder of a once-bright star. If you look closely at the enlargement of the Ring Nebula, you’ll see its little white dwarf. It could live as long as 15 or 20 billion years!
I find planetary nebulae very intriguing. They are at once spooky and gorgeous, and they tell a story of star life that we’ve only recently come to comprehend. There are still many details of the story for astronomers to learn. Knowing how our star will come to its end helps them understand the endless cycles of star birth and death in the cosmos.