One of the often-asked questions astronomers get is “What will happen when the Sun dies?” It’s an obvious concern, since whatever happens to the Sun will affect Earth, but it’s not an immediate concern. The death of the Sun isn’t going to happen for another few billion years yet, so we don’t have to worry about facing it grow larger during its red giant stage and then shrink down to become a tiny ghost of its former brilliance. Many, many generations of humans will live and die on our planet before future astronomers will start to detect the first instabilities that indicate the Sun’s upcoming demise.
There are stars like the Sun out there in space that have already gone through the death process, and so astronomers study them to understand what our star will look like when it finally gets down to the serious business of stardeath. One of the objects they have studied quite a bit is called the Helix Nebula.
ESO’s VISTA telescope, at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, has captured a striking new image of the Helix Nebula. This picture, taken in infrared light, reveals strands of cold nebular gas that are invisible in images taken in visible light, as well as bringing to light a rich background of stars and galaxies.
The Helix was created as a Sun-like star reached the final stages of its life. It began to lose its outer layers of gas, which you can see in the image above as they expand into space. What’s left of the star appears as a tiny blue dot at the center of shell of material surrounding it. That ring spreads out over an area about four light-years across (almost the distance between the Sun and the nearest star in the Alpha Centauri system. This infrared view shows the extent of the gas cloud.
The nebula is made up of of dust, ionized material and molecular gas. it’s all being heated up by ultraviolet light streaming out from the central star (which is very hot). Notice the details in the cloud—there are clumpy, comet-shaped objects called cometary knots. They aren’t really comets, but they look similar to comets with their tails blowing out in the solar wind. In this case, the knots are strands of molecular hydrogen being shaped by the flow of high-energy radiation streaming out from the dying star. Even though they look small, each is about the size of our solar system.
This, in a nutshell (or a gas shell) is about how our Sun will look billions of years from now. Perhaps our descendants will watch it all unfold from a planet around neighboring star, and take similar pictures with their orbiting space telescopes.
Want to know more about this image. Check out the European Southern Observatory site for more details and an array of downloadable images.
How A Star Expanded Our Understanding of the Universe
Humans have stared at the stars throughout history and that makes stargazing one of our oldest sciences. Probably THE oldest, along with the accidental chemical experiments that led our earliest ancestors to create things like soap and tea and other necessities. And, of course, humans have engaged in biological experiments throughout history, and eventually took up engineering and geology and all the other sciences we know of today.
Still, it’s astronomy that piques our interest. I often think about what the first people who stared at the stars thought of what they were seeing.
I’ll give our species the benefit of the doubt and assume that there was intent curiosity about it all, a sense of wondering what they are and if they could be touched or visited. It probably didn’t take long for humans to start woolgathering all kinds of stories about them, and eventually their awe at these sparkly things turned into some kind of reverence. Heck, a sunrise inspires me greatly, and I’m sure it did for those early folks, as well.
I also like to think of those early astronomers getting together and discussing what they saw, debating what the motions meant, how they were made, and what relationship those things had to Earth. The history of astronomy is written by those people who did MORE than just look at the sky. They made careful notes about what they saw, and those observations led to speculation and eventually the application of scientific principles to explain the structure and motions of things in the sky. And, in due time, they shared their knowledge and our societies are richer for it today.
Speaking of meetings, the summer meeting of the American Astronomical Society is taking place this week in Boston. I can’t be at this one, but I’m hearing and seeing lots of fascinating news from the assembled astronomers. They’re sharing what they’ve found — from planetary systems to peeks at the most distant stars and galaxies.
The star that changed our perceptions of distance in the universe. Courtesy STScI.
One story that caught my attention is focused on a star in a distant galaxy. It first caught the attention of an astronomer early in the 20th century. The star is a Cepheid variable star — that is, one that pulsates in brightness in a regular and predictable rhythm. It caught the attention of astronomer Edwin Hubble (for whom the Hubble Space Telescope is named).
He knew that the light pulsations could be used to help measure distances in the universe. So, he did what any self-respecting astronomer would do, he measured the pulsations precisely, kept good records, and when he had enough good data, he calculated the distance to the star.
That calculation (which any student in astronomy can do these days), showed that the galaxy in which the star existed — the Andromeda Galaxy — was not part of the Milky Way Galaxy that we live in. It wasn’t even close. Instead, it and Andromeda were at least 2 million light-years away.
This finding probably excited Hubble very much; enough that he sent a letter to his colleague, Harlow Shapley, describing his finding. Shapley recognized the significance of Hubble’s finding — that is, that the universe was larger than we thought — and commented to another colleague, “Here’s the letter that destroyed my universe.”
It was an important step in understanding how large the universe is, one that astronomers still rely on today to figure out distances to some of the farthest objects in the cosmos. In commemoration of Hubble’s landmark observation, astronomers with the Space Telescope Science Institute’s Hubble Heritage Project partnered with the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) to study the star. AAVSO is a group of dedicated observers (both amateur and professional) who focus on the glimmerings of variable stars. Their work has contributed greatly to our understanding of these stars — and hence, to distances in the cosmos.
AAVSO observers followed brightness pulsations of the star in Andromeda — called V1 — for six months. Their observations were combined into what astronomers call a data “plot” (that is, put into an X/Y axis, just like you might remember doing in geometry or calculus). That plot is called a “light curve” and it shows the rhythmic rise and fall of the star’s light. (If you want to see what a light curve looks like, click on the AAVSO link above; they have some on their front page, and explain them in more detail).
Based on this data, the Hubble Heritage team scheduled Hubble telescope time to capture Wide Field Camera 3 images of the star at its dimmest and brightest light levels.
As a reminder of how important these observations are, the combined data and images were presented at the AAS meeting on Monday (you can read the whole story here). Astronomer Max Mutchler commented, “This observation is a reminder that Cepheid variables are still relevant today. Astronomers are using them to measure distances to galaxies much farther away than Andromeda. They are the first rung on what astronomers call the cosmic distance ladder.”
That ladder stretches out to the earliest stars and galaxies, more than 13 billion light-years away. It’s an awesome achievement for a species that only began looking at the stars with the intent to understand them perhaps a few hundred thousand years ago.
