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A dying star

Apr 9th, 2008 | By admin | Category: Cosmology | Print This Print This

From NASAs Hubble telescopeI just wanted to share this fantastic image from space. I wonder what a Azande might jugde this picture to be. Certainly not what we are thought it to be.

Text and image from NASA.
This image, taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, shows the colorful “last hurrah” of a star like our Sun. The star is ending its life by casting off its outer layers of gas, which formed a cocoon around the star’s remaining core. Ultraviolet light from the dying star makes the material glow. The burned-out star, called a white dwarf, is the white dot in the center. Our Sun will eventually burn out and shroud itself with stellar debris, but not for another 5 billion years.
The planetary nebula in this image is called NGC 2440. The white dwarf at the center of NGC 2440 is one of the hottest known, with a surface temperature of nearly 400,000 degrees Fahrenheit (200,000 degrees Celsius). The nebula’s chaotic structure suggests that the star shed its mass episodically.
Photo taken by with Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2

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