Sunday, April 19, 2015

The Red Spider Planetary Nebula

The Red Spider Planetary Nebula: APOD: 2012 October 29 - The Red Spider Planetary Nebula





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2012 October 29




See Explanation.  Clicking on the picture will download
 the highest resolution version available.
The Red Spider Planetary Nebula
Image Credit & Copyright:
Carlos Milovic,
Hubble Legacy Archive,
NASA

Explanation:
Oh what a
tangled web
a planetary nebula can weave.

The Red Spider Planetary Nebula
shows the complex structure that can result when a
normal star ejects
its outer gases and becomes a
white dwarf star.

Officially tagged
NGC
6537, this two-lobed symmetric
planetary nebula
houses one of the
hottest white dwarfs ever observed,
probably as part of a binary star system.

Internal winds emanating from the central stars, visible in the center,
have been measured in excess of 1000 kilometers per second.

These
winds expand the
nebula, flow along the nebula's walls, and cause waves of hot
gas and
dust to collide.

Atoms
caught in these colliding shocks radiate light shown in the
above representative-color picture by the
Hubble Space Telescope.

The
Red Spider Nebula lies toward the constellation of the Archer
(Sagittarius).

Its distance is not well known but has been
estimated by some to be about 4,000 light-years.




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