This is the Helix Nebula, as imaged by the Spitzer telescope. Another wonderful eye in the sky. See links at bottom for a couple more dramatic eye images. This is a planetary nebula, with a white dwarf star at its core, left over as the late stages of the life of a once vibrant star. (See also here.) What’s the story? Well, you can read at their site, and at the BBC about the fact that new studies are uncovering a bit of a mystery about this object. There’s a lot more dust than there really should be. This object is what’s left over from a star having gone through its expansion phase where at the end of its life it swells into a red giant and blows off its outer layers, leaving only the white dwarf core. So most material surrounding should have been blown away or swallowed. Recent work has shown that there’s a huge amount of dust surrounding the white dwarf, which is rather surprising. The current idea is that there’s activity from comets remaining in the star system (the planets – if it ever had any – are probably all long gone: swallowed or blown away), colliding and leaving lots of debris. This matches earlier studies from last year about another dead star. It also matches with other observations:
Previous observations with the German X-ray telescope Röntgensatellit and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory indicated that the white dwarf was throwing out highly energetic X-rays. While the white dwarf is hot, about 110,000 Kelvin (nearly 200,000 degrees Fahrenheit), it is not hot enough to explain the energetic X-rays.
Material in the form of this surplus dust may be falling onto the star and triggering the extra X-ray activity. It all fits together rather nicely.
And it’s an awfully pretty picture too!
-cvj
P.S. I’m guessing that Amara – an expert on such activity in our local system – might be quite excited about this and maybe can tell us what she thinks the comments? [Update: she has her doubts, and makes a suggestion – see here.]
Here’s a controversial suggestion…. how about people just read the actual post to find out what it is?
Best,
-cvj
no it’s not a galaxy, well, the colours themselves aren’t the galaxy although helix would be. a nedbula is a build up of gas
thank u .a boy from iran.
:~)
God is.
superb eye . i want to know whether it’s sum kind of galaxy or wht is it ?
amazing really
i also want to go there with nasa
Why do the stars and planets have such an abundance of helical trajectories?
Could dynamic noncooperative game theorists such as Tamer Basar and Geert Jan Olsder, SIAM classic, ‘Dynamic Noncooperative Game Theory’ be correct in their use of pursuit-evasion games with cylindical trajectory space [chapter 8]?
Amazing image…
I do believe that the spikes are doubled, so from the stars in the image one can see that the Spitzer telescope has 3 vanes.
Yes. Here’s a picture: http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/technology/telescope.shtml
The vanes do not come from the side of the tube as in a normal earth-based instrument but are part of a stucture holding the secondary that is stuck to the middle of the main mirror.
Bee: “Do I understand that correctly that the number of spikes comes from the ’spider vanes’ of the secondary mirror?”
With reflectors that’s usually the case, but I’ve seen pictures in which some twine/thread was used across the objective of a refractor to create “artificial” spikes.
Hi There,
Thanks! Cool, I googled for diffraction spikes and have learned something 🙂 Do I understand that correctly that the number of spikes comes from the ‘spider vanes’ of the secondary mirror? I actually quite like them.
Best,
B.
Yes, that jumped out at me immediately, but I said to myself “What do I know? They’re the astronomers…”. More to be done here, evidently.
Cheers,
-cvj
Their explanation of the extra dust is ‘comets smashing into each other at the edge of the white dwarf system’. What a peculiar explanation. How often have you heard of comets colliding in our solar system? You don’t because their diameters are small and their number density is too low. I wonder why they don’t think that the usual comet behavior of heating up and sublimating its gas and dust is not a suitable process of generating dust for this system?
If they have the resolution, and if I were them, I would look for warps and resonance patterns in the dust as indicators of what larger bodies might be hidden underneath. A dead planet is still a planet, and could teach us something useful about the end or our own solar system.
Greetings from Nice, Amara
Navneeth, you’re absolutely right…. I was thinking about this while giving the class I ran off to give just after hitting “publish”. Modified. Thanks. Moral: never post in haste….. Thanks for the link too…
-cvj
Bee, those are diffraction spikes. I’m not sure if it’s due to the telescope or image processing, but I’ve seen some amateur astrophotographers play with those spikes (number, length, etc.) to make the image look more beautiful.
Clifford, this nebula is not a supernova remnant. It’s a planetary nebula, which is usually the “end-stage” of a sun-like star, after the red-giant phase. [Too many hyphenated words!]
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap041229.html
beautiful! I’ve a really stupid question (no, really) these bright large stars in the periphery which spread out into the typical star-shape – why does that occur in a hexagon? It that an artifact of the imaging process?
That is AMAZING…