The Cat's Eye Nebula from Hubble
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, HLA; Reprocessing & Copyright: Raul Villaverde
Explanation: To some, it may look like a cat's eye. The
alluring Cat's Eye nebula, however, lies three thousand light-years from Earth across interstellar space. A classic
planetary nebula, the Cat's Eye (NGC 6543) represents a final, brief
yet glorious phase in the life of a sun-like star.
This nebula's dying central star may have produced the simple, outer pattern of dusty
concentric shells by
shrugging off
outer layers in a series of regular convulsions. But the formation of the beautiful, more complex inner structures is
not well understood. Seen so clearly in
this digitally reprocessed Hubble Space Telescope image, the truly
cosmic eye is over half a light-year across. Of course,
gazing into this Cat's Eye, astronomers may well be seeing the fate of our sun, destined to enter its own
planetary nebula phase of evolution ... in about
5 billion years.
No comments:
Post a Comment