|
September 11, 2009
There have been new pictures from the new Wide Field Camera 3 aboard the upgraded NASA Hubble Space Telescope.The image below shows NGC 6302, a butterfly-shaped nebula surrounding a dying star. The WFC3 was installed by NASA astronauts in May 2009, during the servicing mission to upgrade and repair the 19-year-old Hubble telescope.
NASA, Hubble, Butterfly Emerges from Stellar Demise in Planetary Nebula NGC 6302
What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour—fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 24 minutes
A dying star that was once about five times the mass of the Sun is at the center of this fury. It has ejected its envelope of gases and is now unleashing a stream of ultraviolet radiation that is making the cast-off material glow.
|
